Where the wild things are heard

In the waning years of the 19th century, some years after Thomas Edison invented his “talking machine”, the song of the white-rumped shama was recorded using a captive specimen at Frankfurt zoo. It is the earliest known bird recording and it led, eventually, to such a market for avian calls among the leisured class that gramophone records dedicated entirely to birdsong began to be published. Over a hundred years later, access to a new technology is driving a collective of ecologists and enthusiasts to turn its attention to the sounds of India’s wild. In 2025, the group began recording the sounds of the country’s key ecosystems, collecting nearly a hundred hours of recordings across varied terrain. While birdsong dominates the chorus, the calls of insects, frogs, bats, reptiles and even marine animals enliven these soundscapes. It has led to the creation of India’s first open-access, crowdsourced ecoacoustic dataset that can be used to train machine learning models — hitherto limited by access only to data from the Global North — to identify Indian species. The project rests on a simple fact: Sight can reveal only so much, especially in the dense vegetation of the forest, while sound opens another window into the non-human world. Animals use sound to communicate, find mates, defend territory and navigate. These calls can be used to study distribution, abundance, behaviour and even physiological conditions. Similar data has also helped rediscover species believed to be extinct — populations of the elusive night parrot of Australia, a species no one had seen alive for over a century, are now being monitored using acoustic recorders. What began with the song of a shama in captivity has become a way of learning to tune into the wild.