NAISA Sound Byte 21 - The Wetland Project, an Earth Day Tradition
Interview with project founders Mark Timmings and Brady Marks
Coming up on Earth Day (April 22) many campus and community radio stations around the world participate in The Wetland Project, a 24 hour broadcast of the soundscape from ṮEḴTEḴSEN or Saturna Island, British Columbia.
Back in November 2024 Darren Copeland, the host for Making Waves on WGXC Wave Farm, spoke to project organizers Mark Timmings and Brady Marks. On today’s episode we will feature that conversation and end the show by lining up the local time of this broadcast with the recording from 2015 that will play on Earth Day. The soundscape recording featured in The Wetland Project was produced with the assistance of Eric Lamontagne.
Transcript of Interview Audio
[Wetland Project recording, an excerpt starting at 20:45 mark of April 25, 2015]
[Darren]
Let’s begin with an overview of what the Wetland Project has been. It has a long history and I was wondering if you could give us a short summary of what it is and what you achieve with it.
[Brady Marks]
I think it’s your backyard.
[Mark Timmings]
It sort of started in my backyard, yeah. I live on ṮEḴTEḴSEN, Saturna Island, and there’s this amazing little wetland just across the road from my house, which I’d been listening to for probably the last almost 30 years now. And at one point I thought, wow, I need to listen more carefully to what’s going on.
It was sort of background for many years. And I got into this idea that I really wanted to try to understand and feel that I was actually there in this place. Whenever I visit anywhere, I’m always struggling with this thing to really feel like I’m there and connect with the place that I am.
And I thought, well, I live here, so I need to try to really connect. So I met Brady and we started to talk about doing this project of a 24-hour recording of the Wetland Soundscape.
[Brady Marks]
Yeah, we actually met with… Mark and I were both working with Geoffrey Farmer. And we met just around Geoffrey’s studio table, actually.
And we started talking in... 2015? 2015.
And I still am involved with the soundscape show at Co-op Radio. And so we sort of discovered a mutual interest in sound and listening. And the show is really playing soundscape recording and field recordings and soundscape composition and experimental music.
[Mark]
I remember coming to you and saying, do you think Co-op Radio would consider giving us 24 hours of airtime, which I thought would be a definite no. But Brady said, well, let’s find out.
[Brady]
Yeah, they are very open to new ideas. And they’ve been a great supporter of the tradition of soundscape studies in this neck of the woods. So they were very, very accommodating to give us 24 hours.
And so we sort of preempted everyone. And the first year we had people coming in and saying, oh, it’s my time to do the radio show because everyone does an hour. And we’re like, no, you just take the day off.
[Mark]
It was Earth Day. We chose Earth Day so it could be kind of like Christmas for the Earth.
[Brady]
That’s my line. I said I wanted the Wetland project to become like the Yule Log of Earth Day. But instead of Christmas, like life day in Star Wars a little bit.
And I was also inspired by the Slow Television that some of the Norwegian TV and radio stations had pioneered. And so it seemed like a very easy translation to do that on the radio. I was in Oslo working with Judy Radul.
And I went to stay at a hotel. And when you’re working sometimes on a project and you go to the hotel and you put on the television, it’s the first thing you do. And they usually have those little ads with sunsets and people at the pool or something like that overlooking the horizon.
And so there was this boat. And it was looking out of this fjord coastline. And I thought it was an ad. And the sun was low on the horizon. But it just kept on going. It didn’t stop. It didn’t cut to the smiling people except that it cut to like a group of people in a village greeting the boat that was arriving. And I was just completely fascinated by this thing. And it turned out to be one of their Slow Broadcasts where they for seven days they would broadcast the journey of this old mailboat up the fjord coastline. And because it’s so northern, the sun was so low. So you just get these like beautiful sunsets that would never quite finish up. So that was my first introduction to Slow Television. And then we adapted that to Slow Radio.
[Mark]
And that was the first broadcast on co-op radio. It was just co-op radio in 2017. And we were sure that that was a one-off event. And that would be it. But it wasn’t because they wanted to do it again the next year. So we thought we reached out to the NCRA, the National Association of Campus and Community Radio Associations in Canada. And they said, this is great. We’ll reach out to some of our members. And so we expanded to more radio stations that year. And then, well, last year was the eighth annual broadcast. I think we had 34 radio stations. It’s been a total of 44 since we began all over North America and in Europe. And so it’s just it’s really taken on a life of its own. We don’t really control it anymore. It just sort of just keeps going.
[Darren]
And is it the same recording each year? Or you make a new recording for each year? How does that work?
[Brady]
It is the same recording. We have one recording that Mark reached out to Eric Lamontagne, a recordist who works in the film industry. And we actually did 10 channels of 192 kilohertz for 34 hours.
Was that right?
[Mark]
Yeah, it was about 34 hours we kept recording.
[Brady]
And we did them on two different spots. There’s the log that you can see on the website and another spot that was like a ladder with a little rig. And five channels on each spot. And then we just we chose a loop point and we chose which stations sounded the best to us. And there’s a stereo mix down as well. So it’s really treating that space as an amphitheatre and taking one 24 hour snapshot.
And the idea of the microcosm and the macrocosm. And the idea that this one little wetland and this one day stands for a larger thing, a larger moment or the planet or the cosmos up to you how big you want to get. But microcosm, macrocosm definitely.
And a lot of people do think it’s live, mostly because they’re hearing it in sync to their local time. So it does follow that circadian rhythm. And we also broadcast it at a time of the year when the light levels are matched again.
So in the northern hemisphere, you’re getting the same sort of sunrise and sunsets time. And it is really about reconnecting people with that rhythm, that circadian rhythm, that sort of situation or listening situation that we’re co-evolved with in a weird way.
[Mark]
I would say that now some people are even starting to, after eight years, recognize some of the parts of the broadcast and waiting for them. And I guess that’s where it becomes kind of an artwork, is because we have a frame. It’s a very, very big frame over 24 hours. But nonetheless, there is a frame.
And I mean, we’re thinking about that we could eventually do a new recording. It is quite a big production. I mean, we had to power it with car batteries. And basically, when we set the equipment, we would press start. We left.
And so we left the creatures alone with just the microphones, because our presence just really spooks various animals. So they really weren’t being timid at all. They were just feeling quite comfortable on their own.
And then we just came back after the whole period.
[Brady]
And I should say, also, we’re talking about the origin of the project. There was another inspiration, which is Bruce Davis’s concept of Wilderness Radio that he wrote about in the 70s in some of the world soundscape projects, kind of zine magazine things. And he had this great line, which is radio that listens in rather than broadcasts out.
And that was definitely framed as a live broadcast. So there would be sort of a microphone and a tower broadcasting from the wilderness. And we have looked into a live broadcast. It wasn’t feasible in the space. Watch this space, is all I’ll say. It’s still something we’re interested in.
And I think most crucially, it would have been really nice to get it during the pandemic. But also, we’re very happy that it’s not, well, we’re not happy, but it is not pristine. So there’s no edits.
And I think during the pandemic, there would be a very big difference because there’s a number of airplanes and helicopters and cars and dog walkers and door slams. So it’s not like the kinds of things we play on Soundscape often, are very beautiful kind of curated, for example, like seals under the Antarctic. You know, that’s very pristine.
[Mark]
But they wouldn’t want to play it in a Spa environment because of the airplanes.
[Darren]
But this is also an aspect, though, that makes it very Canadian, I think, is that we do have the fortune of living close to these environments that are very acoustically rich. But yes, our vehicles are nearby and so on.
[Mark]
But there is an exchange there, I think, between the human and the natural. Absolutely. And because we were very inspired by the World Soundscape Project and that was, you know, for those who don’t know, sort of started by Murray Schafer back at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver back in the very late 60s. And people like Hildegard Westerkamp worked with him. And the idea was to check in with Deep Listening, to check in on the health of our environment and the relationships that are going on. So for us, having all of those sounds in there was very important because it’s the way the soundscape truly is at this point in our history.
[Brady]
Bruce Davis was also part of that scene.
[Wetland Project recording, an excerpt starting at 15:01 mark of April 25, 2015]
[Brady]
And I feel like that was very much connected to the start of Greenpeace. And there’s a political dimension there for certain, like the anthropogenic in that balance.
[Darren]
And do you feel that that is perhaps why the project has been kind of positively received from campus radio and where a day like Earth Day would be a day for a lot of discussion of the political dimensions of protecting the environment and so on?
[Mark]
I think that a lot of the success is, that I think people really get it that when they’re listening to the broadcast, that they start, they think about ecology and climate change and all of those things. But what we don’t do is we don’t really talk about that. We don’t really preach any of that. We just present the soundscape and people come to their own conclusions. But in some ways, I think that people don’t put up barriers and they just...
[Brady]
Right. There’s something akin to, I would say almost like an embodied knowledge. Or maybe it’s not an embodied, but it’s more like in the land knowledge.
So when you listen to the 24-hour soundscape in sync with your local time, it’s not really like you’re there, but you’re aware of it. And the cycles are very slow, but also quite persistent. And so you can’t but start to learn or open yourself to it.
It’s like you’re not going to... If you have like a wall, like, I’m not listening to this, it’s going to weigh you down, right? Because we don’t have, you know, you can’t close your eyes, you can’t close your ears, right?
And then it’s 24 hours. And if you just put it on in the background, initially you might listen to it very closely, and then you sort of drift, you know, you get distracted by the dishes or, you know, to a radio, whatever you do.
But then it’s like, I liken it sometimes to a clock. It’s like a very smooth clock as opposed to a ticking clock, where each moment runs into the next, and you always know kind of where you are in the day. Just like radio, if you’re a radio listener and you know the different jingles and the shows and the programming that tells you where you are in your day, this is like the OG version of that. And I always talk about this experience of like going to a matinee and then coming out of the matinee and that feeling that you’ve jumped forward in time because you didn’t realize that the sun has changed position or set or something like that.
And it’s the opposite of that. You kind of always know there’s a languidness to the afternoon, there’s the intensity of the night, there’s the fresh brisk energy of the morning.
[Mark]
Dinnertime is sort of, you hear forging, and you just kind of end up relating it to what you’re doing in your own routine. One of the comments we’ve received from so many people is that they’ve listened to or just experienced the broadcast, and then the next day they walked outside their door and suddenly heard the soundscape in their neighborhood that they had sort of lost touch with. So it sort of sensitized them.
It’s funny how they had to listen through devices to get re-sensitized with their own environments.
[Brady]
Sorry to interrupt, but that’s a person on the island who’s hearing the same sounds all the time.
[Mark]
Yeah, one of them. I mean, we’ve got that comment from quite a few people, but there was one of my neighbours who actually, I think it was the third year, he said, I finally listened to your broadcast. And he said, not so much listened to it, but lived with it for 24 hours and how he got up really, he was a builder, so he got up really early in the morning and he said on the radio, it was just the last croaks of the frogs and the very first attempts of bird calls.
And he said, I walked out my door and I heard the birds in the trees and started weeping. So it does move people in some pretty interesting ways.
[Darren]
Is some of that because of the proximity of intimacy that happens with the microphone recording versus hearing it out in the environment?
[Mark]
Yeah, when I’m at home, I mean, I live with the soundscape, so when on broadcast day, when I have the radio on, the actual wetland is also doing its thing, it gets very confusing.
[Brady]
And tangentially with that, like what Mark mentioned earlier, this idea that if you go for a walk in the forest, you’re walking and making noise, foot-fall. All the creatures kind of like hunker down a little bit, let you pass and then resume. And if you’ve ever stopped and just hunkered down yourself, it takes about, I would say like 20 minutes for them all to kind of get back to what they were doing.
And so because the microphones do that for 24 hours, there’s like ducks feeding right below them, there’s like bees buzzing around the microphones. There’s all these really intricate details that are close-miked and also the reverberance of the calls across the water that creates like this little amphitheater. So you can actually hear the trees, you can hear that.
It’s not an echo, but it’s a slight reverberance of the space. And you can hear the wind in the trees, which sounds like tape hiss initially, but it is actually the wind in the trees. So those sounds and that state of the wetland is not something you could do by actually visiting, unless you had like some kind of fancy duck hide, I guess, or long tubes with new ears.
[Mark]
Just dress up like a little Bambi or something.
[Wetland Project recording, an excerpt starting at 4:40 mark of April 25, 2015]
[Darren]
Well, I’m curious to know when you brought the equipment, you picked two different sites there. What were some of the criteria that you kind of went with for choosing the recording locations?
[Brady]
The one was practical, there was a fallen log and that could get us out into the... It’s like a marsh more than a lake, so it’s not...
[Mark]
Very reedy.
[Brady]
It’s very reedy. It gets wet sometimes, but it’s often like just mushy. So that got us out to be able to hear a little further.
More in the centre of the wetland to get a good surround sound. We were doing five channels, so we wanted a sense of the space around us. So the wetland is quite small, so the idea of it being in the centre and listening to everything happening around it seemed… I don’t know where that came from, like it seemed just intuitive because it does have, like I said, an amphitheater kind of feeling to it.
That idea of having close and distant listening, I think for me, it just made sense to get into the middle. And when we used the ladder, that one was fine. It’s just the one on the logs was actually closer to the shore. And so it had some really nice intimate moments where things that were nearer to the shore were underneath the logs. And with the ladder, it was almost too pure an idea of being dead centre.
[Mark]
Yeah, and I think that maybe that set up suffered a bit of problems from humidity. Right, that was a crackling. Yeah, so it just turned out that we could choose from either one, and in the end it was the one on the log that we thought worked best.
[Brady]
Yeah, Eric was very generous in leaving these very, very expensive microphones alone, like, for 24 hours, and also with the dew and the condensation just kind of trusting us.
[Mark]
Yeah, and you can do that kind of thing on Saturna, but it might be a little more tricky in other places to leave the equipment out.
[Darren]
This was done on Earth Day, or was it done on a different day of the year when the recording was made?
[Mark]
It was always our intention to aim for broadcasting on Earth Day, so we were looking at the weather because we didn’t want to do it in the rain. Creatures are a little bit less active on a rainy day, so I think it ended up being on the 25th. It was the closest day to Earth Day.
[Wetland Project recording, an excerpt starting at 5:43 mark of April 25, 2015]
[Brady]
We started to learn a little bit of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ because of the place names and started to understand how the names and the words in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ actually encode and teach a sense of place and practice. It’s been very interesting. This word, ṮEḴTEḴSEN, describes its long nose, which is one description, which in, such a Colonalist, is East Point.
You can imagine this spit of land, so that’s long nose. But it also refers to the beak of the mallet duck and the motion of the duck going to ground, as I understood it.
[Mark]
Yeah, as they are foraging on the ground.
[Brady]
And when they forage on the ground, that tells you that they’re...eating grass which means they taste better if you hunt them. So this sort of three-part triple entendre of the understanding of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ is a rich and new discovery, no, learning, teaching that we’ve learned. So yeah that’s become that’s been really exciting to learn.
[Darren]
What was... did they have a specific insights on the soundscape and on the sounds?
[Mark]
Well one thing I found quite interesting was the word for frogs. They have two words and one of them is, means a frog, one frog by itself which is the way you hear the tree frogs most of the year when they’re up at the trees and and then but they’re not called that when they’re all together in the wetland in the spring there’s a completely different word for the collective of frogs so they change they kind of change identity which I found quite interesting. Waksis. Waksis is I think the word for the individual frog.
[Brady]
Do you want to correct the pronunciation of
[Mark]
ṮEḴTEḴSEN… the long nose… Yeah the wetland is also on a very narrow peninsula in the Pacific Ocean so we get sea birds as well as as well as regular marsh birds. You can even I think there’s a point where it’s pretty hard to identify but you can even hear some sea lions in the distance and sometimes besides airplanes you can hear cargo ship motors, especially at night when when the frog stops singing and it’s a bit quieter.
[Darren]
So this is it’s part of the Gulf Islands but how is it distinctively different than other Gulf Islands? Saturna Island?
[Mark]
I would say yes.
[Brady]
Mark is the hugest fan of where you live which is beautiful so I mean I’ve heard this story so maybe I’ll try.
[Mark]
Well part of it is just that it’s like a 60% of it is now a national park so it’s the it’s the least populated it’s actually the second largest in area it’s got incredible cliffs so nature is still very very prominent there.
[Brady]
I would say it’s a the rain shadow so it’s in the rain shadow of a big the Olympic Mountains and it’s on this huge ocean upwelling, so it’s it’s the there’s a lot of nutrients coming up next to Saturna and yeah and because of rain shadow it’s a lot drier than a lot of the islands nearby. And thirdly, maybe, it’s on the border between the United States and Canada. The border surrounds Saturna on three sides and there’s a shipping lane.
[Mark]
The main shipping lane today.
[Brady]
There’s a tide run which I mean there’s plenty of there are many tide runs. What’s it boiling reef?
[Mark]
Boiling reef yeah there’s the it’s sort of the exchange of tides between the Pacific and Juan de Fuca complex and the the Gulf of Georgia the there’s a underwater ridge from East Point from this long this long nose that actually ends up going underwater and water exchanges back before. I did another our project based on the tides of Saturna and a lot of nutrients are upwelling from deeper down in the ocean so we have like a lot of whales and marine life which is sort of where Brady and I are going on in our next project which is coming up hopefully soon.
[Brady]
Yeah trying to think more about the wetland we know that with climate change some wetlands are gonna get wetter because the runoff because the runoffs melting more and some wetlands are gonna get drier and they think this wetland is gonna get drier because it’s an island and there’s no mountain on the island..
[Mark]
Ot seems like with climate change it’s just getting drier in the summers and then we’re getting these incredibly huge rainfalls in the winter much beyond what so it’s kind of hard to know
[Brady]
And so like frogs are an indicator species because they are very sensitive as I mentioned earlier and wetlands are a sort of also react more sensitively become more extreme during climate change. Big generalizations not a biologist not a geologist but just some things we’ve picked up in in discussing these things with people who are interested in the project.
You know that’s sometimes really lovely like everyone brings their field of knowledge and concern to the project.
[Wetland Project recording, an excerpt starting at 11:40 mark of April 25, 2015]
Making Waves is a monthly one hour program about radio art and sound art that is produced by New Adventures in Sound Art’s Artistic Director Darren Copeland in South River, Ontario, Canada. The show features Canadian, US, and international artists creating sound-based media art. It focuses on the techniques, processes, and motivations of the artists it features as well as individuals supporting the field through dissemination and curatorial activities. The show is a snapshot of what is happening in sound-based media art in the here and now from a northern perspective.
New Adventures in Sound Art invites you tune in on NAISA Radio to the 10th annual “slow radio” broadcast of the Wetland Project on International Earth Day (Wednesday, April 22, 2026).
Since its inauguration on Vancouver Co-op Radio in 2017, listening to the 24hour soundscape from the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in W̱SÁNEĆ territory (Saturna Island, British Columbia, Canada) has grown into an Earth Day tradition heard on 60 radio stations and via the web in over 50 countries.
Artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings invite you to fill your home, work, vehicle and leisure spaces with the resonant sounds of birds, frogs, insects and airplanes! Immerse yourself in the vitality of the 24-hour circadian rhythm of the wetland. The broadcast engages its audience in real time and stimulates a powerful re-engagement with the living environment. As the world spins through turbulent times, “slow radio” offers a life-affirming respite to reflect upon a more lucid and caring future.
Wetland Project respectfully acknowledges that its work takes place on the unsurrendered lands and waters of the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations and within the extended territories of the Hul̓q̓umín̓um̓- and hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking peoples.
Heartfelt thanks to recording engineer Eric Lamontagne and programmer Gabrielle Odowichuk (Limbic Media) for their enormous contributions to the project.