Rainforest sounds - Night in the Amazon jungle

Nightfall in the Amazon rainforest. I'm walking slowly, taking the soundscape in and trying to avoid a myriad critters with every step. Their eyes reflect the light from my headtorch so they aren't difficult to spot. The rainforest is very much alive and crawling with bugs. The occasional snake slithers softly into the darkness.

During the day, the sounds of the Amazon jungle are lush, lively and varied. Birds sing beautifully, frogs croak and mammals call occasionally. As dusk falls, the soundscape becomes louder, more piercing but also less varied. Insects make up a lot of it, assisted by many frogs and the occasional mammal for good measure. Bats are common too, although I can barely hear their high frequency calls. Some of the non-wildlife calls can be startling, like a branch breaking off a tree somewhere and falling to the ground with a deep thud. Even the occasional fruit falling in the oxbow lake catches me by surprise and makes me jump.

Hearing and vision are processed differently in the human brain. Your visual cortex takes a while to receive the information, decode it and process it. Hearing on the other hand arrives at and is processed by the auditory cortex much faster, some 20 to 100 times. It has the power to affect the input from all other senses. It can also affect emotion and the fight, flight or freeze response even before the brain can process what is happening.

Back in the rainforest, there's not a whole lot to see on a night walk. The information I receive through vision is very limited. I would normally rely on sound to paint a more complete picture, but my ears are full and my brain is busy decoding this incredibly thick soundscape. Since this environment is quite new to me, it's difficult to know what to expect and which sounds to treat as possibly dangerous, so I'm experiencing the soundscape fully. This in turn makes me feel like a part of the landscape instead of just a guest looking in from the outside.

Back at basecamp, I fall asleep on my open platform with only a thin mosquito net separating me from the rainforest. The sounds of the jungle lull me to sleep, weaving into my dreams and making me feel like I belong here in this landscape.

Recorded in the Peruvian Amazon with Sound Devices 633 and Sennheiser DMS. Enjoying the videos I upload on here? Feel free to support me by:

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