Remember those “slow TV” videos of trains gliding through the Norwegian countryside? If you’ve ever wanted some sort of audio equivalent, we present to you something called Tree.fm. The site provides looping recordings of various forests around the world.
The immediate appeal of this site is that it’s basically the complete opposite of what you hear when you open the window: no sirens, no shouting lunatics, no trucks rattling by at velocities that can only be described as “unwise.” Instead, it’s just the sound of a forest far, far away.
Apart from providing an instant dose of serenity, though, these recordings are interesting in their own right. If you’re into birding, you’ll probably be in heaven using one of those apps that can detect and identify birdsong to figure out exactly which warbling avians you’re listening to. Either way, it’s fascinating to hear the differences between a forest in, say, Fiji, and one in Sweden.
The bird calls are obviously completely different, but so is the ambient noise, or lack thereof. Some of this is probably down to the nature of the actual recordings—they’re donated by people around the world, so they almost certainly use different recording devices/ microphones/settings/etc—but even so, it’s striking that some forests seem completely silent but for the sound of birds, whereas in others there’s a sort of low-level ambient rustle of leaves and movement through the undergrowth, etc.
If you want to know exactly where the recording to which you’re listening was made, you can click on the location text provided at the bottom of the window, which will take you to a pin dropped on Google Maps. The recordings themselves are all preserved/hosted at archive.org, and can be accessed by clicking on the name of the person who donated them.
The site’s “About” page explains that Tree.fm was created by German agency New Now, and that it was “made possible” by a project called “Sounds of the Forest,” which is an open source library of forest recordings. Those recordings were originally solicited for a performance at the 2021 Timber Festival in the UK, where artists would “respond to” the recordings by incorporating them into musical pieces. (The results of this project remain on the Timber Festival site, and are also well worth a listen.) The creators of tree.fm also shout out field recording-focused online radio site Radio Aporee.
As far as we can tell, though, while the Sounds of the Forest recordings are released under the Creative Commons license and could (presumably) be incorporated into Tree.fm, the latter’s recordings seem to form their own, separate library. If you want to contribute to that library, you can do so via the big “Send us your forest recordings” on the site’s “About” page—otherwise, just grabs some headphones, sit back and enjoy the serenity.
