Indigenous Listening: Recording and Annotating the Sounds of Borneo
By Ben Mirin, Safina Center Launchpad Fellow
Earlier this year I participated in a community-based research program in Sarawak, Malaysia. The program was led through Cornell’s Global Citizenship and Sustainability Program with Professor Shorna Allred. For ten days, I stayed with a Penan community in the village of Long Lamai, 20 kilometers north of the border with Kalimantan. I met with village elders and laid the groundwork for two different research projects, one on the significance of nature in Penan music and one on how bioacoustics (sound recording) could help preserve Penan ecological knowledge.
The music project focused on preserving the techniques for crafting and playing four instruments, the keringot or nose flute, the oreng or mouth harp, a lute called a pagang, and a log drum called the atui. We organized a video shoot to document indigenous musicians going into the forest to build each instrument, then performing various musical pieces and teaching a student how to play. While in the field, I taught groups of Cornell undergraduates how to set up their cameras, audio, and conduct interviews. Then, back at Cornell, we logged our interviews and began editing a series of instructional videos to help and encourage young Penan to play and learn about the music of their people.
The pandemic scattered our team across the country as Cornell undergraduates were forced to return home for the remainder of the spring semester. But while post production went on pause, I was fortunate enough to reconnect with my Penan colleagues over WhatsApp so we could finish another project, a book describing and identifying the sounds of the rainforest. After collaborating on the design and translation, we have produced a rough draft currently submitted to Long Lamai’s Penan elders for review.
Courtesy: Ben Mirin
After eight months in a global pandemic and an agonizing crescendo of political chaos, it’s hard to believe that my 2020 began with a two-day jungle hike into the Heart of Borneo with a group of Penan youth and elders. After a three hour trek, we made camp, then set out to find an acoustically rich location to deploy our microphones. We chose a spot near the mountaintop, where the trees could insulate us from the wind while sounds from all directions still reached our ears. Together, we listened to the jungle’s heartbeat, recording hornbills, barbets, cicadas and tree frogs as the day passed into night. While we listened, Uncle Garen (the senior elder in our group, shown on our book’s cover listening with me) narrated, telling us the time based on the changing composition of sounds. He explained that nomadic peoples often had to rely on the sounds of the jungle to keep track of their day and anticipate the onset of darkness so they could make camp. My friend Franklin (a Penan anthropologist) and I asked him what time it was based on the sounds we could hear. Pointing to the growing crescendo of the cicadas, Garen said it was about 5pm. He was accurate within 10 minutes.
As the crickets started to replace cicadas, we knew we had to return to our camp before the sun set. We strapped my microphones to a sturdy tree trunk, wrapped my sound recorder in dry bags, and headed a few hundred meters back down the trail. We slept beneath the stars, with ants crawling all over us, listening to the changing of the guard.
An excerpt of sound from 4am, when most birds are quiet and katydids and crickets dominate.
When we awoke the next morning, we brushed away our six-legged bedfellows and went to retrieve the gear. In total, we had captured 14 continuous hours of jungle sound, the first such recording made with the Penan in this part of the world.
It was so humbling to share my sound work with an indigenous community, and have them respond with enthusiasm and wisdom. The Penan of Long Lamai have repeatedly told me I’m the first person to show them how to study nature through sound, but I would argue that they already do this. True collaboration reveals complementary knowledge and skills among equals, and I’m excited to see how our relationship and our understanding of bioacoustics evolves. So far, we have listened through the 14-hour recording, and chosen a dozen bird and insect species to highlight in our book. When that book is finished, with photographs and biological information about our featured species, we hope Penan youth will reference it as a guide and learn to identify and understand the sounds of their backyard. I hope we can flip through those pages together someday soon.
A recording of the early morning bird and insect sounds above our campsite. Approximately 5am.