3. Cicada Summer Song

The Essay celebrates the sheer musicality & noise of Earth’s insect singers. 3. Cicada Summer Song. The heavy metal section of the insect world. Billions can make as much noise as a jumbo jet with their vibrating tymbals. Emerging from the warming earth to shed their skins and sing their love songs all summer long. Celebrated by the ancients of China, Japan & Greece. Poet & architect Phoebe Giannisi delves into the myths, poetry & love of cicada song or the Tettix in the Greece of Aristotle & Plato. In 21st-century. New Zealand, bioacoustician Julia Kaspar opened a cupboard of unknown delights at the Tepapa Museum in Wellington. The cicada recordings of Charles Fleming, who enlisted his entire family & an early form of citizen science in the 1960's to identify an extraordinary range of song that doubled the species count.

Charles Fleming Cicada recordings courtesy of Tepapa Museum.
https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/11106

As told to producer Mark Burman

A Storyscape production for Radio 3