for Skip Snow
Gustavo Matamoros
Multichannel sound installation
2013
Recorded in Everglades National Park
The calls of bats occur naturally at frequencies beyond the range of human hearing. We may see bats flying nearby without hearing the sounds they use to navigate and hunt. Distant Bats brings those calls into an audible range while leaving their sources unseen.
I made the recordings along Long Pine Key in Everglades National Park on September 12, 2013, between 6 and 9 p.m., during a month-long AIRIE residency. The work is dedicated to park biologist Skip Snow, who taught me about the bat species likely to be present and advised me when and where I would have the best chance of finding them.
MAKING THE BATS AUDIBLE
The bats were recorded at a sampling rate of 192 kHz. Playing the files as though they had been recorded at 96 kHz lowered the calls by one octave and doubled their duration, bringing ultrasonic activity into a range we could hear. The resulting material was then resampled at 48 kHz for the installation and at 44.1 kHz for the CD release.
The transformation does not replace the bats’ calls with an imitation. It changes their scale in time and frequency, making an otherwise inaccessible acoustic activity available to human listening. We can hear their navigation and hunting calls, although we cannot see the bats that produced them.
LISTEN
Distant Bats — 2′54″ excerpt from the stereo CD version. The audio file includes one additional second of silence.
INSTALLATION VERSIONS
The original composition was made in four channels. For its premiere at the Listening Gallery, I expanded it to eight channels distributed through sixteen speaker points across the gallery’s two unequal zones facing Meridian Avenue and Lincoln Road.
A stereo mix derived from the original four-channel composition was published on CD with the winter 2013 issue of Irreversible Magazine.
Later presentations adapted the work to different spatial conditions. At Granada Golf Course, five self-amplified, independently playing speakers were installed in trees where Florida bonneted bats feed at night.
PRESENTATION HISTORY
November 26–December 3, 2013
World premiere
Sixteen-point public sound installation
Listening Gallery
Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, Florida
January 19, 2018
LIMINAL/ADRIFT: (echo)location
Five-point outdoor sound installation
With work by Robert Blatt
Granada Golf Course
Coral Gables, Florida
August 13, 2019
Four-point pre-concert sound installation
Deep Listening Festival
LAXART
West Hollywood, California
Review of the August 13 performance by Jacki Apple in Fabrik.
PUBLICATION
A stereo version of Distant Bats was released as a limited-edition CD accompanying the winter 2013 issue of Irreversible Magazine, which included David Dunn’s essay “Sounding the Everglades: Sound Artist Gustavo Matamoros and an Unusual AIRIE Residency.”