Alice Boyd

It's like, I guess, playing a game and leveling up.

Last year, I did a project with the RSPB where it was for their film Return, which was celebrating 50 years since the return of the white-tailed eagle, which is the UK's largest bird of prey.

And we were in Pulverbrooks in West Sussex waiting for this bird to make a sound.

So I was waiting there for six hours and it wasn't making a sound.

I turned off my recorder to have a chat to the filmmakers who were there with me.

And of course, it was in that moment that the eagle called out.

And I was like, oh, you've got to be kidding me.

Press record again, and it didn't call again.

And so I think what I've really learned through the process of field recording and trying to find these specific sounds is it's actually so much... It's very satisfying when you do get that sound, and it's lovely to go and try and listen to these more...

more unusual and less frequent sounds like the sounds of nightingales or species that are perhaps on the brink of extinction and having the experience of listening to them but also I think there's something to be said about this other way of field recording which is just going to a place and seeing what unfolds and

It's kind of amazing when you decide to sit down somewhere, whether it's for five minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, however long, and just listen.

So in 2023, I met someone called Martin Stewart, who is a fantastic audio naturalist.

He's dedicated his whole career to going around the world, collecting different natural sounds.

And he's in his 70s now.

And I approached him with this idea of what if I went back to the places he recorded in 50 years ago to see how they had changed.

And yes, I made this audio documentary, this radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 called Shifting Soundscapes.

where I revisited these locations and it was quite a sobering documentary I'd say because over the last 50 years there was a study that came out that said that in the last 50 years we've lost something like 72 or 73 million wild birds in Britain and you could definitely hear that in the recordings and you could also just hear how much noisier we as humans had gotten

So after making that documentary, I felt quite inspired to write a song about it.

And I wrote this song called All We Are, which was released by Earth Percent and Museum for the UN in their campaign called Sounds Right, which has basically taken nature and made it an artist on Spotify and other streaming platforms.

So that with these songs, 50% of the royalties go back to conservation efforts.