A specialist in cicada song, Jérôme Sueur is an eco-acoustician at the National Museum of Natural History.
Scientific adviser to the “MusicAnimale” exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris, he published before the summer, with Actes Sud,
Le Son de la Terre
, a collection of his radio chronicles on France Inter.
LE FIGARO.
- What is ecoacoustics, and how does it differ from bioacoustics?
Jerome Sweat.
-
Ecoacoustics is a discipline directly derived from bioacoustics, which itself is at the crossroads of two sciences: biology and acoustics.
Bioacoustics is concerned with animal behavior, studying the production and interpretation of sounds in the animal world.
Ecoacoustics seeks to follow the evolution of a soundscape as a whole, to analyze its richness and complexity… And to estimate the impact of disturbances such as climate change or direct human activity on this biodiversity.
The ecological dimension is therefore at the heart of your work…
Indeed.
Ecoacoustics has been developed for only ten years, around issues related to the loss of biodiversity and the consequences of climate change.
However, its origin is not linked only to environmental concerns.
They are also the result of technological progress.
The discipline having to be non-invasive, it needed the best technological support to collect data over a long period of time as discreetly as possible.
The research that we are carrying out with my team, in a Natura 2000 classified Haut-Jura forest and another in Guyana, began four years ago and will last fifteen years.
There was no question of maintaining a human presence there.
We put down the microphones and leave.
Next,
all the work lies in the processing of data collected remotely.
Here again, advances in artificial intelligence were essential.
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Why artificial intelligence?
To best distinguish what is biophony (the sounds of animals or insects), geophony (wind or rain), or anthropophony (those linked to human activity).
A soundscape is like an orchestral score.
A thousand times more complex.
And unlike the musical language, we do not have all the codes to decipher it.
Some algorithms are therefore a valuable aid for cross-checking the characteristics of sounds, and better qualifying a soundscape.
In the Haut-Jura, we were thus able to determine that more than 75% of this soundscape came under anthropophony!
Which, for a Natura 2000 classified area, is enormous.
And of course has direct consequences in terms of risks to biodiversity.
Animals, like plants for that matter,
In nature we hear before we see
Jérôme Sueur, eco-acoustician
How is sound an aid in measuring the changes in biodiversity that we know?
Sound communicates a lot of information, and very quickly.
The man has always suffered from the syndrome of Saint Thomas, preferring to rely on what he sees firsthand than what he hears.
A trend that has only increased in recent years.
But we go much faster by ear.
And in nature we hear before we see.
Moreover, sound can be an excellent way to raise awareness of the complexity of living things and their fragility.
How?
Sound has multiple cognitive, social and emotional implications.
This exhibition is a brilliant illustration of this.
By apprehending these soundscapes from an aesthetic angle, we participate in an awareness that is as urgent as it is necessary.
The silence of the world is a fundamental fact in ecological awareness, which alerts us to the dangers of a sixth extinction.
Of course, we would not have treated this subject at all in the same way if the exhibition had taken place at the Museum of Natural History.
But that's the whole point.
The first message that we would like to convey to the general public, by participating in such events, is:
"Open your ears, listen to the richness of biodiversity, to better respect it."
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Does the particularly hot summer that is ending already have consequences on the data collected?
We do not yet have the latest data for this summer.
But in the Haut-Jura, a forest supposed to be the coldest in the country, it could have been up to 40°C this summer.
Some clearings where we particularly follow the sounds of insects have seen all the vegetation scorched by the sun.
We expect these places to be brutally silenced.
As we were able to observe this summer, in several of our regions, the absence of crickets or grasshoppers… When it was not the song of the cicadas that was lacking!
