stories from the colonies

Immersive audio paper 

about the most numerous
societies of this  planet

“Stories from the colonies” is an immersive audio-paper of 33:50 minutes about the most numerous societies on earth. Maybe you think you know them but is that really true? Through metaphorical introduction, the different characters gradually introduce themselves, culminating in a discussion of criteria, zeitgeist perceptions, forced concepts, theories, and impact.

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Please experience the piece before continuing to read this text, as your experience shall not be impacted by the text below!

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No, please listen to the piece, read no further... ...You can come back later.

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This piece aims to foster multi-species perspectives, which are desperately needed in our current world. For some this will be an introduction, to grab interest in these fascinating animals, for others it might be a fictional podcast and then, for some it might be provoking, tackling your concepts.

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Thanks to the Antstore Berlin, and your generous people, for the opportunities to record the Ants: Martin Sebesta Melvin Passow Irina Belova Boris Krompholtz Janik Wiedeman

Why?

This piece aims to get the listener more interested about ants, as there is much more to them, than is casually known. Different species where chosen, to present a fascinating spectrum of ants, relating paralells to humans. The outcome is the culmination of a research process spanning several months into ants. Through the research, parallels of ants and humans became apparent, and a mere presentation of the sounds of recorded ants would have been missing the interesting finds I had made. Therefore an audio-paper- esque format was chosen, not to waste the research and its narrative qualities, in something entirely formalistic.

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How?

The piece utilises 6 different cutting edge voice-models, and elaborate scripting, To achieve emotion, pace and general lyricism, the script had to be written in a style, which differs from normal human-readable-text forms.This meant that each sentence was regenerated 3-9+ times, to find the exact punctuation-characters needed.

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The piece uses real sounds of ants that I have recorded in collaboration with Antstore Berlin. Recordings of ants are rare, and most documentaries use foley sounds (even bbc), further the most prominent scientists rarely study the sounds of ants. Luckily I had access to the Allsounder Aliso, a specialised Geophone, which with its sensitivity makes it possible to hear the ants walking.

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As recording in the ant nests leads to distortion, when there are too many ants at once, elaborate recordings of different individual ants were made and then stitched together, with psychoacoustic spatialisation techniques, to present a more accurate impression of how it could sound in the nest, if the Aliso would not distort. This meant creating different sets of multitracks for each ant, with each their own effects, filtering and space-timing (up to 12+ per species) .This results in a total number of 106+ distinct audio-tracks, used at different timings including other sounds such as atmospheres, music.

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As a final form, a binaural mix was chosen, to achieve the aim of communication about the topic, meaning to maximise access.