Sounds of the Unseen is a sound work for THE HERDS, created with Miiqo Studios. The piece connects migration, distance, and climate displacement through music.
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 was created in collaboration with Miiqo Studios as an artistic contribution to THE HERDS, a public art and climate-action project following the imagined movement of animal herds from the Congo Basin toward the Arctic Circle.
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.
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