“The greatest artist of all time has never been credited for her work. Until now,” reads the website of Sounds Right. Who is she? Hint: it is not one of the pop divas selling out stadiums and carving out records with their new albums this year. It is someone who has been around far longer — since the beginning of time.
Sounds Right is a music initiative that appreciates the value of NATURE, raises money to protect it, and inspires listeners to take further action. The Museum for the United Nations – UN Live is the entity behind the initiative. The organization uses popular culture “to bring people on a journey from being reached to taking personal, practical steps.”
“Global We,” one of its prior initiatives launched in 2022, used repurposed shipping containers equipped with audio and video technology to help people worldwide communicate with each other as if they were eye-to-eye. More than 10,000 people participated, “giving us the largest ever recorded climate action conversation,” the organization claims.
The idea for Sounds Right was born in 2019 with a simple question: “What will it take to engage people and take action on sustainability in Colombia?”
The group to whom it was poised consisted of 40 people, ranging from artists and rock stars to teachers and priests, who had come to Bogota exactly to brainstorm such things. They realized they could mix the natural sounds around them with Latin music and rhythm to not only reach their goal but also create something extraordinary. A music collective called VozTerra was formed.
VozTerra has recorded the sounds of nature and the voices of people in special locations, such as the Regional Producer Forest Reserve of the North of Bogotá and the city of Florencia. Perhaps its biggest project was called “Sounds From Your Window.” Vozterra’s sounds and recordings, taken by members of The Ghetto Project from their windows during the COVID-19 pandemic, were combined and featured in songs.
The four albums attracted an audience of 1.6 million people. Eventually, this exploration of natural sounds led to the question of how to credit the source. Sounds Right was formed to pick up this mantle and provide the solution.
Photo Courtesy Sounds Right
Sounds Right registered NATURE as an artist — although really, an “artistic construct” — with streaming platforms like Spotify so that it could own the intellectual property rights to its sounds. That means she has an artist profile on those platforms, where you can listen to ambient sounds — like the rolling of the waves or whale calls — or songs by artists “feat. NATURE.”
Artists can tap into the extensive databases of recordings operated by VozTerra or The Listening Planet’s music production platform Biophonica
. The latter’s ever-growing library currently houses more than 90,000 sounds recorded in over 60 countries over more than 55 years.
Most of the initially released songs obtained their sounds of nature from such pre-existing recordings. Sounds Right explains that its “ambition is to enable anyone with recordings of NATURE to upload them to a public database that artists can use to create new music and acoustic ecologists can access to monitor the health of the ecosystems we inhabit.”
Photo Courtesy Sounds Right
You may be wondering how popular this could possibly get. In fact, nature sounds have been included in many songs, the earliest being Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic poem “Pines of Rome,” featuring a nightingale, which he first performed in 1924.
Other artists followed in his footsteps. Some of these were more of a gimmick, like the Beach Boys’ use of dog barks on “Caroline, No” on their album “Pet Sounds.” Others were meant to create a particular feeling: girl group The Shangri-Las included seagulls and ocean sounds in their song “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand)” in 1964, and Bob Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat” used cricket sounds to create a nighttime feeling in 1989.
The Beatles were among the first extremely popular acts to popularize the technique, though. The group started with the song “Good Morning Good Morning,” which opened with a rooster’s crowing and went on to feature chicks, a cat, a dog, a horse, some sheep, a lion, and an elephant.
One of the most notable of their many uses is a countermelody of bird sounds on the civil rights movement-inspired “Blackbird.”
More modern songs have also heavily featured natural sounds. Some of these uses have had particular meanings behind them. Big Sean’s “Wolves,” featuring Post Malone, analogizes his family to a wolf pack, featuring their howling. Prince’s “La, La, La, He, He, Hee” features cat and dog sounds mimicking human romantic relationships.
Others are just fun or add to the sonic effect. For example, Missy Elliott’s “Work It” features elephant trumpets, and Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” uses a lion roar for percussion. Most recently, Olivia Rodrigo’s “1 step forward, 3 steps back” features birds chirping at the beginning. Producer Dan Nigro recorded them out of his window, and Rodrigo told Zach Sang that it “sort of adds a cool ambiance.”
Photo Courtesy Sounds Right
Some of the initial artists who have chosen to give credit to NATURE in collaboration with Sounds Right include the estate of David Bowie, whose “Get Real – Sounds Right Mix (feat. NATURE)” employs the sounds of hyenas and wild pigs. In Ellie Goulding’s “Brightest Blue – Nature Remix (feat. Nature),” listeners can hear noises from the Colombian rainforest.
The official Spotify playlist kicks off “Orange Skies (feat. NATURE)” by Louis VI, a hip-hop artist from the United Kingdom. Like many of the other songs, it is a new version of a previously released song. It now includes sounds collected by Biophonica in Southeast Asia, ranging from a blue-headed hummingbird and an orangutan to deforestation from palm oil plantations.
“I purposely put in sounds that weren’t necessarily just beautiful because I wanted a range of sounds of nature,” Louis VI told NPR. That accounts for the five seconds of chainsaw sounds after the verse “chopping down our forests ’til we cough smoke.”
Later on the playlist, you can hear the sounds of rain and thunder in India on Anuv Jain’s “Baarishein (feat. NATURE).”
“Some of my best work highlights ‘nature’ as a metaphor to describe beauty,” he expressed in a press release. “I’m so excited that I get to be a part of the Sounds Right initiative because I get to give back to something that has given me so much, has given me music, and most of all, has given all of us life.”
While several big artists got on board for the initiative’s launch, Sounds Right’s goal extends much further. “Looking ahead, we’re working to make NATURE an artist that anyone can collaborate with, seeding a new model for creative partnership with the natural world while generating royalties for biodiversity conservation and restoration projects.”
Photo Courtesy Sounds Right
In using and crediting the sounds of nature, these artists direct at least 50% of the royalties back to NATURE, which can be used to fund its conservation. The percentage of royalties is even higher at 63% for ambient tracks, where NATURE herself is the main artist.
Corporate and individual donations are also welcome and can be made on the Sounds Right x EarthPercent Fund for NATURE GoFundMe page. EarthPercent, which specializes in helping artists funnel a percentage of their earnings to climate initiatives and calls itself “the music industry’s climate foundation,” will collect all the royalties and donations and give them to conservation and restoration projects.
“While interspecies communication has made some progress in recent years, we’ve had to rely on making a few assumptions on behalf of Nature,” Sounds Right noted about the decision-making process regarding these projects.
An independent Sounds Right Expert Advisory Panel oversees project selection. It consists of Indigenous peoples and conservation scientists, a majority of whom are from the Global South, where many projects will be located. For example, Shivani Bhalla is the founder and executive director of Ewaso Lions, which has protected carnivores in northern Kenya since 2007.
Photo Courtesy Ewaso Lions
The projects themselves are located in ecosystems with the most biodiversity and endemic species, with an initial focus on the Atlantic Forest; Indo-Burma, India, and Myanmar; Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands; the Philippines; Sundaland; and the Tropical Andes.
The projects must also be rights-based and effective. Only those with “proven models of ecological and community impact will be funded, and they should be delivered by organizations with the right capabilities then their impact robustly evaluated,” the initiative explained. It is no wonder it has been able to team up with notable organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and Wildlife Conservation Society.
The songs’ audiences have the opportunity to get in on the action, too: by listening, they help fund the protection of nature. In total, Sounds Right expects engagement from 600 million listeners, equating to $40 million raised.
The hope is that these individuals will also partake in conversations about how to better value and protect nature and motivate them to take action in their personal lives. That could range from being less wasteful at home to pushing for critical local, state, or national legislative policies.
Photo Courtesy Sounds Right
No one has put it better than Katja Iversen, CEO of the Museum for the United Nations. “In a world where empathy is declining, and many people often feel that their actions hardly matter, Sounds Right and UN Live meet people where they already are — on their screens and in their earbuds — with stories and formats they can relate to, and actions that matter to them. Recognizing nature as the valuable artist it truly is will be a game changer.”
