Over six decades, he has captured the sounds of the natural world, from lush rainforests to remote Arctic tundras – sounds that have been heard in natural history series such as Our Oceans and Blue Planet as well as about 150 films, including Cold Mountain and Frozen.
Birdsong and animal calls will interact with orchestral music on an album by Stewart Copeland, the former Police drummer and a seven-time Grammy-winning composer, who has drawn on field recordings made by the British naturalist Martyn Stewart.
I picked out sounds that I felt were the soloists, like the wolves, and others that were more atmospheric, like the wild winds of Antarctica, and treated them in a similar way to a trombone or a guitar … The wolves are howling with great soul, great passion, and accompanied by a trombone following their line.
In a video filmed at Abbey Road Studio, Copeland says: “As I’m composing these sounds, I’m very aware of Martyn out there on his hands and knees in the deepest jungles getting bitten by tsetse fly, black mamba, tarantula, because he has to go far away because of sound pollution … to get this incredible library of sound.”.
Today, if I want to record an hour’s pristine sound, it takes about 2,000 hours to get that because there are so many manmade sounds in the environment … There’s about 10 endangered species on the album … poison dart frogs, wolves, Galápagos tortoise.”.
