African savanna ambience with birds singing and insects calling at various distances - a beautiful and calm soundscape full of exquisite little detail. You don't have to have visited this part of the world to feel like you can instantly relate to and connect with its sounds. Is that a simple matter of humans appreciating lush birdsong or does it signal a deeper bond?
The African savanna - along with its many local variations like plains, grasslands, miombo woodland, shrubland, bushveld etc - is where you, me and every other human alive today can trace our origins back to. The appearance of these environments coincides with the early evolution of hominin, and therefore human species. The science is by no means clear but there are good arguments for this hypothesis (www.nature.com/articles/s4159....
Moving from hard fact towards more elusive ideas, I wonder if these sounds can still be part of our genetic material, at the very least as a vague response on a subconscious level. Without sounding too new-agey, maybe we can relate more to African savanna soundscapes than to, for example, New Guinea rainforest ambience, or surely busy cityscapes. Someone needs to do a double blind test and measure the response in a group of people from different backgrounds.
Regardless, one of the reasons I keep going back to Africa in search of pristine natural soundscapes is a feeling of going back home. One of the possible reasons for that is the fact that I grew up on a subsistence farm in a rather remote and wild part of Romania, which is not unlike some of the places I've visited in Africa. Another reason might just be the fact that a primitive part of my brain responds well to these sounds - sounds that our ancestors have heard for aeons as they evolved in Africa's savannas.
Recorded with Sony PCM A10 and Lom mikroUsi microphones in South Luangwa NP. Video shot with Sony A1 and Sony 135 GM lens. Enjoying the videos I upload on here? Feel free to support me by:
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#naturesounds #africa
24 ноя 2022
