Both the above photograph of a river in the Bosavi Rainforest and the photograph collage below were used to promote the film that Steven Feld built around these audio recordings in collaboration with filmmaker Jeremiah Rah Richards. This film, also titled Voices of the Rainforest was released in 2019. (source)

Voices of the Rainforest Track Listing:

  1. From Morning Night to Real Morning
  2. Making Sago (feat. Ulahi)
  3. Cutting Trees
  4. Clearing the Brush (feat. Ulahi)
  5. Bamboo Jew’s Harp (feat. Gaima)
  6. Relaxed by the Creek (feat. Ulahi)
  7. From Afternoon to Afternoon Darkening
  8. Evening Rainstorm
  9. Drumming (feat. Gaso, Gigio, Sowelo, and Agale)
  10. Song Ceremony (feat. Giwo and Wasio)
  11. From Night to Inside Night

Voices of the Rainforest is a series of soundscape recordings by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld that offers a sonic immersion into the Bosavi Rainforest in Papua New Guinea. These recordings come out of Steven Feld’s extensive fieldwork amongst the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, and the recordings center around their interactions with and understandings of the forest environment. Several of the recordings feature vocal and instrumental song by Kaluli musicians, while others focus on the more-than-human sounds of the rainforest. The track embedded at the bottom of this page, “From Afternoon to Afternoon Darkening” captures the striking, visceral transition that the forest makes with the progression of the day into evening. A little after four minutes into the recording there is a dramatic shift in the soundscape, initiated by a rapidly pulsating, almost nasal-sounding birdcall and followed by a rise in insect drones that shimmer against one another with hypnotizing discordance.

The other soundscape tracks, such as “From Morning Night to Real Morning” and “From Night to Inside Night” present similarly striking moments of expressive transition in the forest ecology. The recordings  with human musicking, such as “Clearing the Brush,” Cutting Trees,” “Bamboo Jew’s Harp,” “Relaxed by the Creek,” “Drumming” and “Song Ceremony” present Kaluli musicality in a variety of contexts, as work songs, individual leisure songs, and group ceremonial songs. The project as a whole allows for a consideration of the “voices of the rainforest” as variously human, animal, and plant, and elemental voices that inform and form one another. (source)