Patrick Quinn

For a week in May 2024, along with Calling All Ears Collective (CAEC), I recorded and did deep listening sessions of periodical cicadas and the sounds of the Anthropocene around them throughout the state of Illinois - the state I grew up in.

Periodical cicadas are amazing creatures that spend nearly their entire lives underground as immature insects; they come up for a few weeks once every either 13 or 17 years to molt into adults, bask in the sun, mate, lay eggs, and then die. In May and June 2024, trillions of cicadas belonging to Brood XIII (17-year cicada) and Brood XIX (13-year cicada) emerged from their underground burrows across the Midwest and South - a convergent phenomenon that occurs once every 221 years. In Illinois, Brood XIII (sometimes referred to as the Northern Illinois Brood) covered the northern part of the state and Brood XIX (also known as The Great Southern Brood) covered the southern half of the state. However, there was a thin area in central and eastern Illinois where the two groups of cicadas overlapped and if you listen close enough you can hear them chorusing together on some of the recordings included on Sonifying the Sun.

For this project, I used a variety of microphones and listening devices - an omnidirectional pair, geophones, hydrophones, contact microphones, and electromagnetic receivers - in an effort to listen to the cicadas and their surroundings in different ways. Some of the cicadas fell into the streams, lakes, and rivers at a number of our recording locations due to the crowdedness of the trees, their preferred habitat. It was fascinating to record and interact with them in the water. At one point, cicadas desperate to get back on land, swam to my hydrophone, then proceeded to climb up the microphone cable and eventually onto my shoulders before drifting back into the trees.

Periodical cicadas are gone from the surface for the time being, but not forgotten sonically and otherwise.