#012 David Dunn

This month’s The Wire (issue 357) magazine has a feature on David Dunn, a sound “ecologist” living in New Mexico. He is using sound recordings of bark beetles to fight their depletion of boreal forests. The beetles’ range is expanding and consequently these arthropods are destroying trees across America. By playing sound recordings of the beetles back to them, interspersed with non-repeating patterns to ensure the beetles can’t familiarise themselves with the sounds, the “beetle’s neural systems [are sent] into overdrive” and they consequently die. This is one method that could be used to control the spread of bark beetles, however there is the problem that the sounds interact with all organisms in the trees, and not just bark beetles. To me this is a very interesting control method and captivates my interests in Zoology and sound/field recording. David Dunn seems to build the majority of the tools he uses, and I would be intrigued to see them in a live setting. In the past he has published many pieces, including “Why Do Whales and Children Sing?”-a book and CD combo that documents the different ways the animals around us make noise.