God's Chorus of Crickets : Facts

Story:

Crickets sound like humans singing in chorus when slowed down.

Other Versions

1. If You Slow Down A Recording Of Crickets Chirping, It Sounds Like Humans Singing.

2. Amazing Recorded Crickets Sounds like Angels Singing.

Picture about God's Chorus of Crickets — God’s Chorus of Crickets

Analysis:

An interesting sound recording which has been doing rounds online claims to show a slowed down recording of Crickets chirping that sounds like humans singing in chorus. The composer Jim Wilson calls the recording as “God’s Chorus Of Crickets,” and is even sold on Amazon. The claims are mixture of hoax and facts.

About the Recording

The slowed down recording of the crickets chirping sounds like a gentle and hypnotic chorus of tiny human singers, and some even felt the cricket “music” is like a symphony of angels singing in otherworldly rhythm. As such, it does not appear so.

Firstly, the actual recording of crickets by Jim Wilson that surfaced in late 2013 is not new and has been circulating in various recording versions, the oldest one dating back to early 1990’s. One Jim Wilson who shared it as Tulku Music described it as an extended, digitally re-mixed and re-mastered version of crickets’ recording.
A two-track recording of the crickets is also made available, one with crickets chirping at normal speed and another with greatly slowed-down recording of crickets, which is said to match and mirror the length of the average lifespan of a human being.

Origin

The original cricket recording appears to be captured by Jim Wilson, who in 1994 featured the cricket track as “Twisted Hair” in album “Music for the Native Americans” with Robbie Robertson. The track that you can listen in the video shown also featured Native American opera singer Bonnie Jo Hunt, who sang an additional melody over the track. In one of her interviews, the singer describes her recording experience of cricket track with Robbie Robertson, who brought the recording of crickets in his back yard into the studio and lowered the pitch (to sound like a church choir) to a large extent. He seems to have told the opera singer, `I want you to do whatever you feel like. And, now, these are crickets.’

These factors are suggestive that the track in question may not be just the crickets chirping. Moreover, according to a related article on scienceblogs.com, depending on the gender of the crickets and their purpose of chirping, there are also four different types of calls that crickets emit. Few people tried to replicate the same kind of ‘human’ chorus by recording crickets chirping and slowing it down at various levels.

As you can hear below, one such attempt from a SoundCloud user Dave D’aranjo does not produce the same kind of ‘human’ or ‘angelical’ chorus, it sounds more cricket-like. So the composer Jim Wilson might have used additional means to create the beautiful harmony in the sound clip. It appears like some sort of melody was added to the original sound recording of crickets chirping to make it sound like a western chorus, or a well-trained church choir.