CE06 聽秋 Ting Qiu - Listening to Autumn 
From the liner notes [1]
A tree full of the same species of Oecanthus will eventually reach total synchronization, and the whole tree will pulsate as if they were one huge cricket. This attracts a lot of females from the nearby region, but it is equally important to stand out individually, as the male who would provide the best quality offspring – and indeed after careful listening one may identify the distinct features and tonal quality of many individuals even within the same species.
It is common for the tree cricket to bite a hole in a leaf or sit in a leaf fold, using it as a megaphone or an open baffle loudspeaker. The cricket can also direct his sound in a very concentrated manner, virtually scanning the landscape. Slight movements at intervals makes it possible to cover large areas of the surroundings angle by angle and grade by grade.
All these things, as well as numerous other parameters that influence the tonal quality (the age of the crickets, the temperature they are singing in, the time of day or night, how well and how long ago they were fed, if they are singing in a large group, in a small group or alone, together with species of their own kind, if females are present or not, calling for females or defending territory, the resonance of the surroundings – for example, if they sit in a glazed or an unglazed clay pot, soft or hard calebash, hourglass-shaped or just plain round, muffled or open, with or without a lid, cork or ivory lid, etcetera, etcetera) have been considered, formed the basis for experimentation with the capture of their sounds, and has had great artistic impact on the final selection and meticulous editing of the recordings.
It was not too long ago that there was a highly specialized profession in China: the “cricket tuner”. To tune crickets, known as dian yao 點藥 (i.e. attaching medicine), one had to be extremely skilled, almost like a brain surgeon, because it involved putting a perfectly heated, very minute lump of resinous material similar to colophony on the exact spot on one of the wing covers to change the weight of the wing, and thus the pitch and timbre. If this was made with the least bit of carelessness, as it was an irretractable process, it would ruin the cricket forever.
A multitude of these changes in tonal quality have been carefully recorded and investigated in my recordings, and some of the more spectacular and beautiful aspects are evidenced in the musical composition that is presented here to a wider audience. But of course, this universe of sound can be further explored ad infinitum.
These recordings are the result of labourious experimenting with live crickets over many, many years. The compositions on this cd have been planned and carried out over months of living with crickets at home, in the wild and in the studio. Literally hundreds of hours have been recorded, edited and narrowed down to a repertoire of little over eight hours, which in its turn, has been shaped into this compositional audio distillation. What you hear are true acoustic recordings of the crickets’ natural sound, never tampered with in any synthetic fashion. The extraordinary tonal variation comes from the care taken in the arrangement and selection of crickets and their positioning at the time of recording.
Sounds of Crickets
Crickets produce sound by rubbing their jagged wing covers, called tegmina, each with a sound-producing membrane, together. This rubbing, called stridulation, goes on for hours, and is only interrupted when the cricket is startled or changes its position in order to be heard better. The cricket’s tympanic organs can vibrate with up to 20,000 cycles per second, well beyond the sensitivity of the human ear, and recent research has also shown that even the fluid in the veins of the wings has an amplifying capacity. The singing males themselves are said to be able to block out their own sound – they supposedly don’t hear it – as it is so loud it might otherwise be unbearable for them during their extended playing sessions.
It is only the males that produce sound, and they do it to attract females, to make sure there will be more of their kind in the future. To avoid confusion, each species has its own song. It is necessary to adher to this sonic identity for several reasons, but apart from the collective denominating sound of a species (so as not to attract females from the wrong species) it is also important to have an individually distinguishable sound. The most predominantly heard crickets on this cd are of the Oecanthus family, with species and subspecies from different parts of China, all with their own distinct stridulations. For these recordings I have selected groups that, when singing in unison, produce tone interference and have complex rhythm that makes them go in and out of synchronisation. The pitch of Oecanthus crickets depends on the temperature, and to a degree also on their bodily constitution. Volume and resonance are determined by the size and shape of the wing covers.
Created at Bolingo Productions in Sweden, copyright Lars Fredriksson | Latest revision Saturday 7 October, 2006.