Billions of traces of life — birds, whales, mammals — merge into sound. Their journeys shape an ever-evolving composition that listens to the heartbeat of the Earth.
OUR ROLE Creative Direction, Concept, Production, Programming, Sound Design // CREATIVE PRODUCTION, CONCEPT, PRODUCTION MIIQO STUDIOS // PHOTOS Header Image by The Walk Productions, photography by Vegard Aasen // GIF ANIMATION 1) Kinshasa - Congo Basin (c) Berclaire for The Walk Productions // 2) Manchester City Centre (c) David Levene // 3) Medina. Marrakesh, Morocco. (c) Oussama Oulhiq // 4) HM King Charles meets THE HERDS at Lancaster House (c) Jaber Ahmed (DEFRA) // 5) Makoko River, Lagos. Photograph by Kashope Faje, for 88 Life Studios // 6) Venice, Italy. Photography by Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia // 7) Paris, France. Photography by David Levene // YEAR 2025
Sounds of the Unseen — created in collaboration with Miiqo Studios — is our artistic contribution to THE HERDS, a landmark public art and climate-action project that journeyed from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle, following the imagined flight of animal herds escaping climate disaster.
For this global movement, we created a living, generative soundscape composed from billions of animal-tracking data points. Guided by real patterns of migration, the work transforms scientific information into a poetic experience — a sonic memory of biodiversity in motion.
This evolving music now weaves through the BBC documentary podcast The Herds – Life-Sized Puppets Flee Climate Change, carrying the voices of migration into sound.
Listen on BBC Sounds
A LIVING COMPOSITION
We developed a custom sound engine that interprets every data point as a musical gesture. Low frequencies mirror terrestrial movement; high tones trace birds across continents; fluid harmonies follow marine life beneath the surface.
Over the course of four accelerated seasons, the piece continuously renews itself — never repeating, always alive. Like the migrations it mirrors, it breathes, transforms, and fades into silence before returning again.
Special thanks to the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior for granting access to this remarkable dataset.
