Edited by Yujin Tchun
Over the last 55 years, Martyn Stewart has managed to amass the world’s largest private collection of wildlife sounds, with nearly 100,000 pieces comprising over 30,000 hours of recordings. These recordings - many of which have previously been included in numerous nature documentaries and films, have recently been released to the public for free by Stewart in hopes of inspiring people as he draws a close on his life (Corbley, 2022). They were released on a project called Martyn Stewart’s Listening Planet through Platoon Records.
Stewart was able to find his calling early, having always listened to the sounds around him in nature, he was able to record his first bird (the Eurasian Blackbird) at age 11 after borrowing a microphone from his brother. This career later allowed him to travel across the world recording the sounds of animals, soundscapes, natural disasters, and so on. Some of his favorites are the Daintree forests in Australia, Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, and Dawn in Zimbabwe (Wetzel, 2022).
One of the main reasons he was prompted to release his recordings was from being diagnosed with terminal bone cancer in 2020. He also found that it was important to try and raise awareness of our impacts on nature with the resources he has while he still has time, making points to discuss how the growing amounts of noise pollution had made his job harder in recent years, as well as the need to preserve already existing animals. Some of the animals he’s captured have gone extinct over the years, including the Northern White Rhino and the Panamanian Golden Frog (Savage, 2021).
When discussing his career and the recordings, Stewart said “I hope they have the connection between sound and the animal emitting the sound,” adding on, “I think we have to become the voice of the voiceless. If we can get these beautiful sound recordings out and let people in the world listen to them, maybe we can start protecting what we’ve got left” (Corbley, 2022).
References
Corbley, A. (2022, February 23). Wildlife Sound Recordist Releases Treasured Audio
Collection for Free – to Awe and Inspire the World. Good News Network. Retrieved
March 8, 2022, from https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/200-of-martyn-stewart-sound-
records-are-available-for-free-on-soundcloud/
Savage, M. (2021, December 2). Why this wildlife expert is making his archive public. BBC
News. Retrieved March 8, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-
59404975
Wetzel, C. (2022, February 14). Listen to These Amazing Sounds of Lost Places and
Animals Within Them. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved March 8, 2022, from
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/listen-to-these-amazing-sounds-of-
lost-places-and-animals-within-them-180979394/
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