58.10066889887569, 26.556893513707646
88MHz



Silent Spring









About

Silent Spring transforms an Estonian woodland path into a living loudspeaker for the Baltic’s threatened birds. Turning a repurposed NATO hand-crank generator, powers a line of bird boxes, each concealing a salvaged FM radio tuned to a nearby micro-transmitter. As visitors walk, some radios broadcast the birds’ calls exactly as captured on analogue tape, while others layer those voices with delicate microsound textures and atmospheric static. After a few minutes the chorus dies, remaining silent until someone cranks again - making the fragility of both electricity and biodiversity impossible to ignore.
Named for Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring - which warned that unchecked chemicals could leave future springs devoid of birdsong - the installation revives that cautionary message in real time. Each fade-to-silence reminds visitors that today’s ecological losses are no longer hypothetical; they hinge on the energy we choose to invest, or withhold, right now.

Beyond the brief burst of birdsong, Silent Spring positions listening itself as an ecological act. Because every note depends on human effort at the crank, visitors become part of the circuit, confronting how personal energy and collective will are required to keep fragile species-and their stories-alive Silent Spring. 
By rerouting obsolete radios from broadcasting human news to carrying the voices of nature, the work acts simultaneously as a requiem and a warning, reminding us that communication with the non-human world is already breaking up. Finally, its low-impact materials and closed-loop power system model how technology can inhabit a landscape without overriding it, suggesting a path toward artistic and ecological practices that sustain, rather than drain, the environments they occupy.
Location

This installation is featured at Maajaam, a centre for art and technology located in the rural landscape of southern Estonia. 

Presented as part of the Wild Bits exhibition series, the project engages with ecological listening, energy, and media archaeology in the context of forested environments. For more information, visit wildbits.ee and maajaam.ee.

Artists

Iris Voss
Andrew Melchior

Silent Spring




Bird Species









Critically Endangered

1. Yellow-breasted Bunting (Emberiza aureola)
→ Found in: Finland

Endangered

2. Saker Falcon (Falco cherrug)
→ Found in: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland

3. Great Bustard (Otis tarda)
→ Found in: Poland
Vulnerable

4. Lesser White-fronted Goose (Anser erythropus)
→ Found in: Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland

5. Black-legged Kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla)
→ Found in: Lithuania, Poland

6. Aquatic Warbler (Acrocephalus paludicola)
→ Found in: Latvia, Lithuania, Poland

7. Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus)
→ Found in: Finland, Latvia

8. Rustic Bunting (Emberiza rustica)
→ Found in: Estonia, Finland, Latvia

9. Red-footed Falcon (Falco vespertinus)
→ Found in: Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Poland

10. Greater Spotted Eagle (Clanga clanga)
→ Found in: Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland

11. Black Stork (Ciconia nigra)
→ Found in: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, PolandRegionally declining

12. Skylark (Alauda arvensis) – declining in EU, considered Vulnerable regionally
→ Found in: All countries

13. Corncrake (Crex crex) – EU Birds Directive Annex I species
→ Found in: All countries

14. Ural Owl (Strix uralensis)
→ Found in: Estonia, Latvia, Poland

15. Pygmy Owl (Glaucidium passerinum)
→ Found in: Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania

16. Red-breasted Flycatcher (Ficedula parva)
→ Found in: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland

17. Red-backed Shrike (Lanius collurio)
→ Found in: All countries

18. Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella)
→ Found in: All countries

Numbers









Between 1980 and 2017, Europe lost an estimated 560–620 million individual birds, equating to a 17–19% decline—nearly one in five birds vanished during those decades.

Within the EU, nearly 39% of bird species are in poor or bad conservation status, while 19% are officially classified as threatened, and 20% are in the “Near Threatened / declining” category. 

Between 1990 and 2022, a monitoring index tracking 168 common bird species showed an overall 14% decline across the EU - demonstrating that even once-ubiquitous species are being swept into decline. 
Yellow-breasted Bunting has suffered a staggering 90% population collapse between 1980 and 2013, accompanied by a 5,000 km contraction of its breeding range. 

The Aquatic Warbler is declining by about 40% every 10 years, with fewer than 14,000 singing males left globally and breeding now limited to just ~40 sites. 







Field Notes





“Field recording, for me, can be a two-way conversation - an idea sparked by a 1960s BBC film in which David Attenborough lured unseen monkeys from the canopy by playing their own calls back to them. That simple act of “talking” rather than merely documenting reshaped how I think about microphones, tape and place. Silent Spring asks visitors to do something similar: animate the forest by giving energy to the birds’ voices.

A second catalyst came the moment I arrived in Helsinki and heard bird calls played through the airport speakers. I found the same gentle soundtracks played in Finnish hotels and other public spaces. Those polished loops, meant to soothe, convinced me to push in the opposite direction. The birds in Silent Spring do not provide spa ambience; they surface through static, abrupt tape cuts and microsound artifacts precisely so the listener cannot glide past them.

Each edited loop is re-contextualised with varispeed, splicing and letting blips of FM hiss eclipse the calls entirely. By foregrounding noise (the very stuff a radio dial usually rejects) we underline that habitat loss and signal loss are inseparable.

If a walk along the path feels unsettled rather than idyllic, the work is succeeding. The goal is not to decorate nature but to expose its current frequency. Fragile, fractured, and dependent on our willingness to crank a handle and keep the conversation alive.”

- Iris Voss


“I’ve always seen radio not as a medium of nostalgia, but as a haunted space - a flickering ghost band where lost voices echo. That fascination started with my grandfather’s tales of the Royal Corps of Signals in Burma in WW2, and deepened through years of building spatial sound systems in museums and galleries, composing and producing music and creating multidimensional soundbeds for augmented virtual and extended reality apps. For Silent Spring, I wanted to make something fragile: a temporary broadcast from the edge of extinction.

What if the forest could tune into us as much as we into it? That question drove the project’s architecture. I sourced second-hand radios not for aesthetic charm but because they arrive already scarred - bodies marked by time, ready to host the fading songs of Estonia’s most threatened birds.

This is rupture and glitch. The distorted decay of magnetic tape, the erratic buzz of fading FM drift. If the experience feels slightly broken, it’s because the world is. Within that interference lies a proposition: that the act of listening can still hold agency. That we might - just might - tune back in.”

- Andrew Melchior


Info









Artists

Iris Voss
Andrew Melchior


Field Recordings

Frank Lambert, Lars Lachmann, Peter Stronach, David Darrell-Lambert, Romuald Mikusek, Tero Linjama, Lars Edenius, Michel Veldt, Livon, Niclas Backstrom, João Tomás, Aku Kalliomäki, Uku Paal, Timo Janhonen. 

Selected bird calls used in this installation were sourced from open conservation archives and open-access community database of shared bird sound recordings. We are grateful to the many contributors who have made these recordings publicly available for artistic, scientific, and educational use under Creative Commons licenses.

Individual recordists are also credited on the Xeno-canto website for each call. We acknowledge and thank them for their generosity and dedication to sonic biodiversity.


References

1. BirdLife International. (2021, November 16). Huge declines in Europe’s birds revealed in new landmark study. Retrieved from https://www.birdlife.org/news/2021/11/16/press-release-huge-declines-in-europe-birds-eurobirds/

2. European Environment Agency (EEA). (2020). Bird populations: latest status and trends. Retrieved from https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/topics/at-a-glance/nature/state-of-nature-in-europe-a-health-check/bird-populations-latest-status-and-trends

3. European Environment Agency (EEA). (2024). Common bird index in Europe. Retrieved from https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/common-bird-index-in-europe

4. NatureGuides. (2015, June 9). The decline of the yellow-breasted bunting: A modern tragedy. Retrieved from https://www.natureguides.com/blog/2015/6/9/9odgmvi8obf9mflbvyg1bj4zort4h6

5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Aquatic Warbler Memorandum of Understanding. Wikipedia. Retrieved June 11, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_Warbler_Memorandum_of_Understanding

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