The sound of ants communicating with each other by scraping their legs on their bodies.
The echoes under the surface of a small freshwater pond.
The sound of a pine forest dying.
These are just a few of the sounds David Dunn has investigated in his decades as a composer, musician, acoustic ecologist and audio engineer. His compositions, soundscapes and other projects fuse art and science, inviting us to pay close attention to nonhuman activities and environments that usually pass beneath our notice.
Recently Dunn has applied his bioacoustical research to the problem of dying pine forests. For almost two decades, pine trees across the American west have been decimated by bark beetles, whose populations have exploded due to warming temperatures. The beetles have destroyed over 45 millions of acres of pine trees, disrupting ecosystems and altering landscapes — and they show no signs of stopping. Dunn and his collaborators have been awarded a patent for technology and protocol that uses sound to disrupt key behaviors and life stages of bark beetles to slow the devastation of pine forests.
UC Santa Cruz music professor David Dunn has received a patent to help fight bark beetles ravaging Western forests, killing millions of trees throughout the West. Here’s a video explaining his bioacoustic research in the context of bark beetles and Western forests.