Stridulation Amplified: compositions with the stridulatory organ of Atta cephalotes

by Kuai Shen

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Limited edition to 100 vinyls, signed by artist

Includes unlimited streaming of Stridulation Amplified: compositions with the stridulatory organ of Atta cephalotes via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

By acquiring this album, you also get a schematic of the electric circuit I used to record the original sound of the ants, so you can build your own piezoelectric amplifier to hear any kind of acoustic vibrations. Additionally, you also get a unique computer-vision video of my ants self-organising, as part of the visuals I project in my ant-mediated installations, which I produced using Open CV in Raspberry Pi.

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1.	The Leafcutters & The Crying Supersoldier 00:52	buy track
2.	Sonic Trails in Otongachi 03:38	buy track
3.	A Major's Last Lament 00:45	buy track
4.	Ants and Humans in a Lab 00:43	buy track
5.	Pheromone Tunnel 00:36	buy track
6.	Vibratory Modulation 00:35	buy track
7.	The Fungus Garden 00:54	buy track

about

The compositions are recordings of the acoustic vibrations, scientifically known as stridulations, which are produced by leaf-cutter ants (species Atta cephalotes, native of the Neotropics in South America) in order to modulate their messages as part of their social communication. The recordings were engraved in a vinyl record, a medium which is in fact a polymer derivative of the organic polymer, which naturally composes the exoskeleton of ants and most insects on the planet, i.e., chitin.

The ants produce these acoustic vibrations by using the stridulatory organ, which consists of a sharp scraper located on the posterior border of the post-petiole, the plectrum, and of a file of transverse ridges located on the upper surface of the anteriormost part of the abdominal segment, the pars stridens. When the abdomen is jerked up and down, the plectrum rubs against the pars stridens, producing a stridulation between 2kHz-46kHz depending on the size of the ant: this physical rubbing produces acoustic energy which is in itself a mechanism analogous to dragging a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable, producing what is commonly known as scratching. Thus, this reveals the connection between scratching, as an aesthetic expression created by human culture, and the stridulation phenomena produced by ants as a modulation mechanism for social communication.

This if the first time (as far as I am aware of) in the history of insect bioacoustics, that the sound of this species of leaf-cutter ants has been captured, engraved and mastered in a vinyl.

"Stridulation Amplified: Compositions with the stridulatory organ of Atta cephalotes" was produced for the Manifesta 9th Biennial exhibition in 2012 as part of Kuai Shen's reactive sound installation, "0h!m1gas: biomimetic stridulation environment", which shows my leaf-cutter ant family being monitored with open computer vision and amplified by piezo-microphones connected to a pair of turntables which produces scratching sounds using this same vinyl.

credits

released November 8, 2017

The field recording was made at the Reserva Natural Otonga, in Sto. Domingo de los Tsachilas, Ecuador. The production costs for the vinyl were partially sponsored by Kunststiftung NRW.

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about

Kuai Shen Cologne, Germany

Kuai Shen is a naturalist and media artist who studies and loves ants. He explores interspecies relationships inspired on the one hand by the emergence and self-organization of ants, and on the other hand, by the subjective intertwining of social beings with parasites, bacteria and viruses. ... more

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