Onomatopoeia and analogies are used to describe a hoot, hoof, or bispiseo. But before the lexicon, what is needed is knowing and knowing how to be in nature. Carlos de Hita does with sound the same as many columnists do with life: he hunts a detail and tells a story. “A rain that soaks and does not sound, beyond an imperceptible murmur of millions of drops falling from the trees. It is the horizontal rain that distills persistent fog, the air turned into water ”, is the sound macrophotography that the sound engineer and author of Visual and Sound Journey through the forests of Spain (editorial Anaya Touring) captures the forest of the linden trees and the ravine of water on the Canary Island of La Palma. Yours is a stereo book. Through the scanning of QR codes with a mobile phone, the reader can listen to what he reads. These visual and acoustic records are carried out equipped with microphones and a digital recorder. The closer you are to the source, the more your sonograms look. A graphic representation of the sound contained in 74 QR codes and abstract drawings of the tones and the volume of the interwoven of a forest song.
Carlos de Hita absorbs with his micro to the silence of the beech forests of Liébana, in Cantabria
The distance is silent to the sound. Even the white silence of the Cantabrian beech forests of Liébana absorbs its microphone mounted on a parabolic reflector. A contraption that is reminiscent of the inverted cone that some dogs carry after having undergone surgery. Carlos de Hita (Madrid, 1959) knows that a snowflake is almost dumb, but the fall of many of them, added to the creaking of the cut branches, the whistling and hammering of the blackbirds, the hawking of a common great tit and, in the background, the clicks of a group of red-billed choughs is a noise. De Hita is the Miguel Delibes of sound waves. He records and describes the sound that surrounds him; the Valladolid novelist wrote about life in the country. One listens, the other listens, the dialogues of the earth with and among its inhabitants. What they do and did is based on a rich, simple and rooted vocabulary. His words sound like an extinct world, an ecosystem populated and flown over by birds that carry in their names the onomatopoeias of the sounds they make: the turtledoves lull tur tur, the owls frighten with their bu bu, the owls seem English when pronouncing aut aut and finches whistle pin pin . Vocabulary that emanates from the attention people used to pay to things around them. Creative and playful people, like the voice of a blue tit bird, are the ones that gave name to the contradictory toponymy of the Valsaín forest, on the northern slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Carlos de Hita lives, knows and recites this Segovian pine valley: “From Navalparaíso to the Valdeinfierno stream there is only one stretch. From Buenos Aires and the Sabrosa hill to the Reventón port and the Quebrantaherraduras pass, an excursion. Passing through the Plains of Accident, the Corrals of the Desperate, the streams of Fear and the Soul of the Devil ”.
In the woods, open-air concert halls, invisible tenors are hidden: wolves, lynx, grouse and bears. Howls, meows, cackles and grunts not always possible to hear. Without patience there is no microphone or recorder to capture them for playback. On the other hand, it is easier to attend as a public at the bellowing in the Cabañeros raña, in Ciudad Real. Deafening and interlocking bellows of the male red deer in heat. Loud and horny arguments in front of the females who cough harshly to hide.
De Hita spends more time assembling everything recorded in his studio than outdoors. Under the sky, in the open, between trees and rocks, it has been 30 years on the lookout for hums, melopeas, crocitares and any sound that propagates in those wooded soundboards that are the forests. The inhabitants of the same are at the same time musicians, instruments and suppliers: firewood, coal, wood and cork. Navarra and Gipuzkoa share the Sierra de Aralar and the Sakana valley, floating forests and shipwrecks. Keels, ruts, codastes, frames, frames, platforms, oars, oars and the masonry of the ships that sailed the seas when Spain was what few today long for were built with the wood of its oaks, albatross, elms, holm oaks, holm oaks, beech and fir. And the ends were made with hemp. From the fluffy surface of the cork oaks of the Cadiz mount La Almoraima comes the cork with which the Catalan winemakers make the caps of the cava bottles.
Each forest has its sounds and moments. The drumming of the woodpecker percussionist, a thunder that explodes in the sky and rumbles down the slopes filling all the spaces and nooks, or the rubbing of horns against the branches and the drops of water running down the leaves are some of the great successes of nature. They are shrill, fast, liquid, grinding sounds and many other more adjectives. The darkness, humidity and freshness of the atmosphere facilitate its spread. Also the fog makes everything sound better, deaf and quiet. A choral concert, out of tune, out of phase, and without a baton that gives entrance to the orchestra. Noise that turns into music, increasingly monochord, in the ears of naturalists such as De Hita, Joaquín Araújo or the late Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente.
Carlos de Hita reflects listening. The result is a book in which the pages howl, bellow, chatter and make hundreds of other sounds. When we close our eyes, the voices of nature place us in a stereo space that we see by hearsay. Without the existence of the forests he has recorded, his book could not have been made, nor would we breathe.
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