NATURE.
Now officially an artist.
Sounds Right is a new music initiative to recognise the value of nature, prompt conversation, raise funds for conservation through an innovative mechanism, as well as inspire millions of fans to take action.
It is an initiative by Museum for the United Nations – UN Live, developed and delivered in close partnership with musicians, creatives, nature sound recordists, as well as environmental, campaigning and global advocacy organisations.
“The world is calling for us. And it has been for a really long time. We can feel deep inside of our very core, that something is wrong. Working with my friend FREDRIK on ‘A Soul With No King’ has mended something in me. I understand where my anger comes from. And what to do with it. And having Brian Eno do a remix of our baby has been a dream. He and I are so connected, it felt very right to do something together. For the Earth. From the Earth.”
Become a fan of NATURE
With Sounds Right, NATURE has now been registered as an artist on various music streaming platforms, and owns its own Nature sounds. By simply listening to a Sounds Right track – pure nature sounds or human artists featuring NATURE – fans and music lovers will directly protect the environment through a portion of royalties being disbursed to high-impact conservation initiatives.
Sounds Right works with artists to encourage millions of music listeners to take further actions to conserve nature and become fans of NATURE, from recording the dawn chorus to support biomonitoring, to creating broad scale awareness and behaviour change. It is anticipated that it will engage 600 million people across the globe and raise $40 million dollars for nature conservation.
Become a fan of NATURE. Listen to the Feat. NATURE playlist here.
“I am excited to be part of this campaign that seeks to recognize the creative contribution and authorship of the more-than-human world. It is an essential first step towards acknowledging that humans are not the only species that respond creatively to the world around us.”
From big bang to big shot: How NATURE became an official artist
In 2019, Museum for the UN – UN Live brought together a diverse group of more than 40 artists, teachers, rock stars, environmentalists, priests and activists in Bogota, Colombia, to explore creative ways of engaging people in nature conservation.
An optimistic question was asked to the group: what will it take to engage people and take action on sustainability in Colombia? The group agreed – to somehow combine the deep sense of nostalgia for the Amazon with the country’s universal and unifying love of music and rhythm.
Listening to the sounds of biodiversity in combination with a Latin rhythm, the sounds blended together into a transformative experience, and the group started to see their goal in action: using sound and music to drive change. This led to the formation of the music collective ‘VozTerra’.
VozTerra embarked on a journey to collaborate with local musicians and acoustic ecologists from over 20 countries, as well as indigenous leaders from the Amazon, leading to their project ‘Sounds From Your Window’. They invited the public to record nature sounds around their homes during the global COVID19 quarantine, and the recordings were used as samples for music – resulting in four music albums which reached 1.6 million people. VozTerra went on to win the Latin American Green Awards.
Shortly after, they produced ‘Grita Tierra’ (the Earth cries out), an original song mixing Latin American rhythm with a multicultural range of voices from Colombia, Mexico, India, and Kenya – inspired by Pope Francis' Encyclical Laudato Si' to express the urgency of environmental care.
Simultaneously, UN Live ran a research project on the impact of sound as a tool for activist engagement in 2021, together with partners like BBC Climate Action, Exaptive, Institute for Sound and Music, We Are Museums, Climate KIC, and more. It convened leading thinkers and creatives such as Bernie Krause, Diana Ayton-Shenker, Vozterra, Michael John Gorman, and David Njuguna to discuss and map the relationships between sounds, emotions, and actions.
The project showcased the power of bringing a diverse group of partners together to explore engagement through sound and music, and how empathy, participation and connection was mapped as an experienced outcome across multiple sound and music initiatives.
In late 2021, Vozterra’s idea to create green music, started a conversation about how to give Nature intellectual property rights. In the following months the idea of working with Nature as an artist eligible for royalties was developed which led to the birth of Sounds Right. Building on these previous experiences, the Museum for the United Nations – UN Live convened a powerful array of partners to launch global music releases that spotlight NATURE as an artist.
How the royalties
flow back
to Nature
The Sounds Right initiative is not a one off, but the start of a broader push for Nature, with inbuilt heart beats, regular track releases, and discussions about the value of nature across the globe. The Sounds Right launch will break new ground by presenting Nature as a music artist, and by having created a new credible and scalable innovative finance mechanism to capture music royalties and distribute them to high-impact conservation projects around the world.
While interspecies communication has made some progress in recent years, we’ve had to rely on making a few assumptions on behalf of Nature.
-
First, that she’d prioritise conserving and restoring ecosystems with the greatest levels of biodiversity and endemism. Our analysis together with strategic advisory partners identified the following natural landscapes to be prioritised for funding: Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands; Indo-Burma; Sundaland; Philippines; Tropical Andes; and, the Atlantic Forest. The Fund is in addition exploring how artists may also direct royalties to priority ecosystems. As the fund evolves, it will focus on additional landscapes.
-
Second, that she’d want the money to be spent in the most effective and ethical way. Only rights-based projects with proven models of ecological and community impact will be funded, and they should be delivered by organisations with the right capabilities then their impact robustly evaluated. She’d pay special attention to local projects and initiatives that are effective in protecting biodiversity strongholds, and have measurable impact.
-
And finally, in the absence of being able to speak for herself, that she’d want to be represented by Indigenous Peoples who are some of her most critical guardians (who carry the biggest burden in protecting our natural world) as well as leading conservation scientists and practitioners. Further, her representatives should mainly be from the Global South since that is where most of the landscapes we hope to support are based.
In addition to fans generating funds by listening to the amazing artists from around the world who are releasing new or remixed tracks that are enhanced by sounds of the natural world, there’s an additional opportunity within this initiative. To spark conversations about how Nature can - and should - be valued in our society and economic model. More often than not we have a purely extractive relationship with the environment, either treating it as a resource to be optimally exploited or a ‘waste sink’ to dump our rubbish and pollutants. Sounds Right partners have created a simple mechanism that goes some way to properly valuing nature for its creative contributions to music.
The dream is to inspire and support fans of NATURE to take further environmental action, whether at a household level or advocating for societal changes that redress our extractive relationship with nature.
Expert advisory panel
The Sounds Right Conservation Fund, hosted by EarthPercent, will be initially overseen by an independent Expert Advisory Panel, consisting primarily of Global South conservationists.
The Panel collectively holds expertise in conservation science, rights-based approaches (including advocacy for the rights of communities and Indigenous Peoples), as well as conservation focused program implementation, strategic advisory, and fund management. See the board members below:
David Emmett (Conservation scientist, head biodiversity conservation partnerships at Hempel Foundation, and conservation impact investment advisor)
Dr. Shivani Bhalla (Award winning conservation scientist protecting 4,500km2 with Samburu community in Kenya; developed an open source framework on community driven decision making)
Mindahi Bastida (Director of Original Nations Program; Expert on biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge and related topics; UNESCO consultant on sacred sites and bioculture)
Kavita Prakash-Mani (Founder of multiple Asia-based nature conservation organisations; served strategic advisor to WWF, AsiaGrow, etc.)
Partners
Sounds Right was developed in consultation with the United Nations Department of Global Communications, along with founding partners: Earth Percent, The Listening Planet, VozTerra, Earthrise, Hempel Foundation, Community Arts Network, Dawn Chorus, LD Communications, Dalberg, Axum, Music Declares Emergency, Limbo Music, Count Us In, AKQA, LD Communications, Eleutheria and Rare. Spotify is supporting Sounds Right's global launch through access to its extensive platform in support of nature conservation. Sounds Right is also joining forces with The Nature Conservancy and Wildlife Conservation Society to encourage millions of music fans around the globe to recognise the value of nature and to inspire them to take action.
Hempel Foundation provided catalytic funding and strategic direction to elevate the programme into a global initiative that taps into the power of popular culture for biodiversity conservation.
We are also grateful to 15. Juni Fonden and William Demant Fonden who is supporting national roll-out of Sounds Right - more soon
Sounds Right partners
Sounds Right collaborators
