2,722 views
The Bat's song, Le Chant des Chauves-Souris, for a choir of bats and a solo cello. In order to move, hunt and communicate with each other, bats constantly produce sounds, to utter cries. Their life depends entirely on their extraordinary faculty of echolocation, on the incomparable quality of their hearing, on the precision and the power of the sounds that they produce. These sounds that they constantly emit in flight, we are not able to hear them, they are ultrasounds whose frequency is too high for the human ear. But if we record these inaudible vocalizations and slow them down between 50 or 100 times, then they offer themselves to our listening and we discover that these apparently silent beings are in fact formidable singers. The Song of the Bats consists of assembling and composing their voices in order to make them sing in chorus, accompanied by a cello discreetly infiltrated among them, and to make us love them. With, in order of sound appearance: Barbastella barbastella, Eptesicus serotinus, Myotis mystacinus, Myotis bechsteinii, Nyctalus leisleiri, Pipistrellus nathusii, Pipistrellus pipistrellus, Plecotus. Recorded (audio and video), edited and mixed by Jarek Frankowski. Production of the bat video: Laura Farrenq, images: Tanguy Stoeklé, editing: Soline Caffin (Pretty Good Films-Noctilio productions). The Bat's song was commissioned by the Henri Pousseur Center. Director in computer music: Xavier Meeus. Thanks to Pierrette Nyssen, chiropterologist at Natagora, for her recordings of the bats. Recording made in concert at Arsonic on March 24, 2022.