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Mark Burman encounters the sonic wonder of a cicada emergence not heard for 221 years.
What’s black and red and incredibly noisy?! Two broods of periodical cicadas (Brood XIII and Brood XIX) singing their love songs. These two broods overlapped in their summer emergence in northern Illinois for the first time in 221 years. Mark Burman took his many microphones to the Lincoln Memorial Gardens, just outside Springfield, to revel in this insect cacophony. As he wanders through the woods he hears from excited school kids, musicians and composers from as far afield as Japan and Ireland - also drawn to this sonic symphony of lovemaking and death.

The periodical cicada and its overpowering song has always exercised our imaginations, achieving deep symbolic resonance not just in America but in many other global cultures. The first American colonists and settlers recorded what they referred to as ‘locusts’ as far back as the 1600s, worrying that these entirely harmless and glorious insects somehow presaged plague or wrought destruction on crops. They noticed that Native Americans feasted on them and devised their own recipes but mostly they were stunned by the enormous din of an emergence that can be louder than a jumbo jet’s engines. Even now, in this manmade world of machines and noise, these little insects resonate their tymbals (males only) to produce intense songs of love that hypnotically pummel your ears. So gather round, slip your headphones on, and listen in binaural sound to this wondrous insectile cycle of life.

Produced, sound designed and presented by: Mark Burman
Reader David Sterne