A rustle among the great oak trees of a deciduous forest. The swish of a tail, deep in the tropical rainforest. The soft, deep breaths of a giant in slumber. The hushed footsteps of a four-legged creature stalking its prey in a wide, flat expanse of savannah. In Apple TV+’s new series “Earthsounds,” viewers traverse into the previously unknown auditory cosmos that the natural world beholds.
The “Earthsounds” crew spent three and a half years chasing elusive animals in deep jungles and trekking across frozen glaciers to capture an array of extraordinary sounds that unveil what life on Earth sounds like — sounds of more than 80 species that cumulated in over 3,000 hours of recorded audio across 20 countries in every corner of the world.
A pair of koalas mating, which the first episode of Earthsounds captured using pioneering auditory technology. (Apple TV+ Press)
The project was a collaboration between Executive Producer Alex Williamson and Producer Sam Hodgson, both experienced wildlife filmmakers and colleagues from a previous 2020 series titled “Earth At Night In Color.”
The two were excited to tackle a new project and wanted to bring audiences views and sounds that were never previously heard before — some not even by leading research scientists.
“We really liked the idea that the natural world is buzzing with millions of sounds but our human ears only can hear a teeny tiny fraction of it,” Williamson said. “The idea was to reveal these stories to the audience, and in doing so, what we discover is that animals don’t use sound like we do.”
Although animals do use sounds to converse with one another in the traditional sense as humans do, it is also used to find mates, to defend themselves from predators, or to sedate prey. Most importantly, many of the sounds they made were unexpected and give insight into how animals interact with each other beyond typical depictions in cartoons or movies.
“They make sounds in really weird ways. There’s a small Amazonian bird that rubs its wings together like a violin bow and a violin string. There are exploding shrimp, there’s kind of roaring koalas,” Williamson said. “So across the series, we wanted to use new recording technology to really get the audience to hear our planet like never before.”
A snow leopard, which the “Earthsounds” crew used stealthy remote-controlled recording microphones to record. The sound was one of the most ambitious that the team embarked on to record, according to Sam Hodgson. (Apple TV+ Press)
“Earthsounds” doesn’t hold back from the surprises it holds for the audience.
“You’re immediately plunged into this beautiful natural soundscape. And then as you journey deeper and deeper into that soundscape, you discover more and more amazing ways that animals use sound in nature,” he said. “Landscape on earth has a slightly different set of sound rules [versus the human world], and there’s more to nature than meets the eye.”
To accomplish such a task required advanced technology that would allow the crew to capture sounds with unmatched clarity and authenticity. The creativity of new technology went beyond usual methods – and the stratosphere.
NASA infrasonic microphones measured sound pressure to record the rumbles and roars of elephants from space. For recording the smallest and quietest organisms that would normally scutter away upon human contact, this meant employing delicate spider vibration microphones that used laser vibrometers to record the sounds of arachnids spinning silken strands. For the large, aggressive prowlers, that are too dangerous to approach, sound-proof buggies were able to record the intimate calls between lions and their cubs through remote control.
Specialized underwater microphones called hydrophones recorded the clicks, whistles and pulsed calls that whales make to navigate, feed themselves, and mate. (Apple TV+ Press)
The audio that “Earthsounds” features extends past to the living world, featuring sounds of some of the world’s most intriguing processes: the Northern Lights radio recorders adapted high-frequency radio receivers to translate auroras from the North Pole into detectable sounds.
Certain processes occurred over periods longer than was feasible for a TV series, and to account for this limitation, Hodgson detailed the time “warping” technique the team used to shape sounds into shorter timeframes.
“[In] the last decade or so we’ve been able to record behaviors – we’ve been able to see behaviors using special cameras in super slow motion,” he said, referring to the ability for cameras to warp phenomena that occurred either too fast – like the fluttering of a hummingbird’s wings or too slow – like the blossoming of rare flowers. “But we’ve never been able to do that with sound … so using this technique called time stretching, we were able to … actually slow those sounds down so you can hear exactly what’s what’s happening.”
This editing strategy led to stunning discoveries: when the team used time stretching on a clip of a lyrebird’s crow, they found that it could sing multiple notes at once.
“By being able to slow sound down, we can reveal sounds and behaviors that we may have seen and heard before but we can do that in a completely new way,” he said.
The show closely collaborated with ecologists and research professionals to ensure that the recorded audio was also used to advance understanding of auditory processes across numerous species.
The crew of “Earthsounds” spend more than three years chasing elusive soundscapes in hopes of finding audio from previously unheard corners of the planet. In the photo, a crew member lowers themself into the Puerto Rican rainforest to perform an acoustic analysis. (Apple TV+ Press)
Williamson said the team was able to prove how certain species of whales capture fish by blowing “bubble nets” through a cooperative hunting strategy.
“There are scientists still poring over our recordings, so it’s been a great endeavor working with researchers and scientists right across the planet.”
During the COVID pandemic in 2020, shooting came to a halt and started up inconsistently afterward. In total, the team spent 226 days in quarantine.
For the producers, filming “Earthsounds” was more than just a job: it was a chance to view firsthand the undeniable beauty of the planet and a lesson learned in just how little is known about sound and wildlife.
“You get to hear quiet deserts, which are seemingly silent, but listen carefully [and] there’s lots of hidden conversations going on there. You get to hear the cacophony of the Amazon rainforest. When you listen carefully, actually, there’s order to it and every animal has their own bandwidth,” Hodgson said. “All the different habitats on the planet have different sounds to them and animals [use] sounds in different ways so wherever you are, listen to the series and I think you’d be surprised.”
A meerkat peers into the tiny cameras that captured authentic footage and audio of animal interactions with one another and their environment, as well as some of Earth’s most elusive processes. (Apple TV+ Press)
Williamson shared similar sentiments, highlighting the under-appreciated soundscapes of a wide range of ecosystems, and at times, the uncanny resemblance they bear to sounds in the human world.
“There are some really beautiful, unexpected and mesmerizing sounds of our planet. For example, as the sand dunes [of Namibia] heat up and cool down, they make this low, resonant, reverberating sound, [so] they’re called the singing dunes,” he said. “We [also] managed to inject these teeny tiny microphones onto the bark of [cottonwood trees in Montano] so we can listen in to the sounds of them drinking and it sounds like they’re slurping on a McDonald’s milkshake – it’s kind of really unexpected sound.”
“Earthsounds” is a testament to how the flora and fauna of the planet can collide with innovative technology to produce explosions of sounds and scenes from hidden worlds.
“Open your ears and get out and listen to the sounds of nature because nature sounds amazing,” Hodgson said.
