The sound of (almost) silence

Whooshing trees, clattering fish, fizzing reed piles: at the National Trust's Wicken Fen Nature Reserve, a new trail conceived by audio-visual sculptor Kathy Hinde gives voice to the life that hides under or around the surface of ponds and ditches

- By Carla Passino

A GALE is rising, rain falls in angry roars and a sudden clatter breaks through the air like thunder—except that no storm is on the horizon. That blustery din is the ‘voice’ of the Cambridgeshire fens, the life that hides under the seemingly still surface of ponds and ditches. The clatter comes from fish, the ‘rain’ from rising bubbles—‘and if you listen to a tree,’ says audiovisual artist Kathy Hinde, ‘it’s very windy’, the sturdy trunk coursed inside by a maelstrom of whooshing, whispering and whistling.

Nature conceals a symphony of sounds, but a lot of them are very quiet and must be amplified to be heard—which is exactly what Ms Hinde is doing with a new trail that has just opened at the National Trust’s Wicken Fen Nature Reserve in Cambridgeshire. This is one of the most biodiverse places in the country, yet, she explains, you can’t see the vast majority of its almost 10,000 species, because they are too small or too well hidden, so ‘when you do amplify underwater or underground sounds, it blows people’s minds. It completely reveals this other side, which is bustling with energy’.

Ms Hinde uses contact microphones for her recordings: ‘If you hold it up in the air, you won’t hear anything; but when you actually strap it onto something, squeeze it into a gap between branches or push it into the peat, you’ll start to hear the sounds that are inside.’ Overhead dome speakers dotted around the landscape then bring these hidden ‘voices’ to life as people walk underneath them.