I've Been Listening to This Cricket Orchestra for an Hour and It's Tripping Me Out

When I was younger and first getting into computers—which meant sneaking away from my mom at the grocery store to go read magazines—I was obsessed with the idea of becoming a "power user." You know, a Windows wizard that could fire out hotkeys, shortcuts, and every other productivity-maximizing shortcut in a blaze of keyboard kung-fu so beautiful that even Mavis Beacon would weep at a mere GIF of the process.

I'm not sure if power users still exist—or PC enthusiast magazines, for that matter. But I suppose I, like many of us, fall under the 2013 definition: I often find myself typing emails while walking and talking on the phone; I'm currently developing a cocktail called the Ctrl-W; and I've currently got so many tabs open that they no longer show their icons, which means I've been listening to a cricket orchestra for an hour straight because I can't find the tab I opened from a tweet, for reasons unknown, sometime this morning.

Thankfully, the slow moan of Robert Wilson's recording remains conducive to a clean stream of uninterrupted thought. Wilson, billed as an experimental director and playwright at the link where we were first introduced, recorded crickets' nighttime song then—because crickets are faster paced than we humans, as the narrator notes—slowed the track down to human levels of speed and pitch. The result is a haunting soundscape that's impressive in its largesse. Who'd have guessed mere crickets could sound like a choir of ghosts warming their pipes in an old barn?

In a bid to find more info, I headed through to the first site's source link, an article published a month ago. There, we find a bit more info: the normal cricket-y sounds, which are currently pulsating into the back of my skull, is a track of crickets at regular speed, with the human-speed track layered underneath.

(Wait, hold on. Pretty sure I just heard cricket wings, which sound awesome. Let me tab over: Yeah, around 12:25, cricket wings aflutter. [I accidentally refreshed the Soundcloud about 12 minutes ago and had to start over.])

This human-speed cricket concept is based on the idea that crickets live much shorter lives than we do. But as you can't actually slow their lifespan, measured in months, to stretch out into years, Wilson instead stretched their song. It's an interesting commentary on time, as is the fact that such a piece of work—which was actually published to Soundcloud a year ago—continues to make regular appearances in the ever-mounting detritus of the internet. My current source link trail ended with a home page, not an article, at which point I've given up and ctrl-W'd all the related articles I pulled up.

(I'm aware that I'm now adding to the pile, and that this rambling may come off as a thin attempt to create a blog post about a cricket orchestra I'd set my heart on sharing before finding out it was actually a year old and thus not current enough for the hyper-relevant blog cycle, but I'd argue that's a pretty goddamn cynical thought for a Friday afternoon when we all know we're daydreaming of pizza and tequila anyway.)

Speaking of time, I'm still listening to these crickets, and I can't decide which of the two mild cricket-induced hallucinations swirling through my brain I'd rather slip into: that of a frozen ice cavern that's got a nice blue tint (because it's cold), or a daydream of burrowing into hay.

Speaking of crickets and time, this isn't their first foray with internet fame. A year ago, researchers managed to reconstruct the song of a 165 million-year-old cricket by modeling the sounds its fossilized wings would make. It's far less complex than the cricket orchestra, and kinda sounds like a pissed-off Tamagotchi. But the research is cool, and the sounds are a nice addition to the cricket moaning I'm still listening to, which is really starting to trip me out. I'm not sure what it is about time and crickets that the internet can't get enough of, but I think it's time to admit that, power users or not, I've had enough of all three.

@derektmead