To hear the cicadas sing, enthusiasts travel from near and far

“(I’ve been) taking naps here every day. I’ll leave my door open,” he said. “And I travel with the cicadas as they’re singing, doing their chorus. I find it very relaxing.”

From the park’s west-facing Hickory Point campsite, Bradley broadcasted a live feed of the singing cicadas between noon and dusk one day as part of his project Calling All Ears Collective, a platform for entomologists, sound artists and the curious to connect with the acoustic intricacies of this year’s cicadas. After his visit, Bradley will share his field recordings with artists and use his sound compositions to create a curated show with a percussionist friend for Wave Farm Radio.

“Our time here is very brief, and we need to do everything we can to protect our critters,” he chuckled as a cicada landed on his shirt, “and love and appreciate them. … I want people to be able to listen to the cicadas and know that this is a real rare moment.”

All roads lead to Illinois

Karen Power has traveled from her hometown of Cork, Ireland, to remote locations in the Amazon jungle, Antarctica, the Namib Desert and more, to escape human noise and make music blended with natural soundscapes.

This month, her art brought her to Illinois.

At Illinois State University in Normal, Power organized a walk to hear from local residents about how cicada sounds were altering their environment and to hear how the insects’ calls bleed into other noises.

“Nothing exists in isolation,” she said, adding that listening carefully is a way of acknowledging, respecting and learning from other forms of life.

Power said she feels there is no distinction between music and other sounds. And folks annoyed or worried by the volume of cicada choruses, might not think twice about attending a loud concert or going clubbing.

“(I’m) offering people the time and space to change their perspective and to kind of lean into what it is they’re hearing and allow themselves to be shaped by it, rather than repelled by it,” she told the Tribune a few days before her trip.

While at the university, Power said she planned to put on a musical performance using field recordings from other parts of the world and to record cicada songs for pieces she wants to compose with other musicians.

“I’m just hoping to be changed by this experience. And I hope that my mic survives … I can’t wait to be overwhelmed,” she said.

“I would love it if more species would do this, try and put us in our place a little bit,” Power said. “There are all kinds of relationships on this planet. We’re just one tiny and insignificant part of that.”

At the state capital’s Lincoln Memorial Garden and Nature Center, Matthew Wolkow pressed play on an online recording of an individual courtship song from a Magicicada septendecim — one of the three species of 17-year cicadas from the Northern Illinois Brood.

Close by, a female cicada responded with a “wing flick” signal. Wolkow pointed to a tree a few feet away, where the responding insect must have been perched. He had an amused smile on his face.

“This tree is very magical,” said Wolkow, a Canadian filmmaker from Montreal and Bradley’s project co-coordinator, as sound designer and mixer Alex Lane held what looked like a boom mic up to the tree.

That’s because distinct calls from a few different species and maybe even both the 17-year and 13-year broods were coming from its branches, they said, adding they’d need confirmation from scientists.

Before the cicadas emerged in late May, many scientists said they expected the broods to be adjacent but not overlap in Illinois. Even if there are some areas of overlap, Wolkow was told, it would be hard to find them because they would be small areas.

And it can get so loud it becomes hard to separate the choruses and calls of different species.

“When it gets to about 90 (decibels), there’s a point where your brain is oversaturated with information,” Wolkow said. “Here, it rarely even reaches 80 decibels, but with the variety, the diversity and the thickness of sound, so far, it’s like the best place.”

Listening closely

For his documentary on this year’s double periodical cicada emergence, Wolkow asked scientists and artists he interviewed: “What will it sound like in 221 years?”

The question invites reflection on how humans are shaping the environment around them as they build, expand and remove trees under which cicadas spend most of their lifetimes. Scientific data on periodical cicadas is limited to their 13- and 17-year cycles, Lane said, so there are gaps in distribution maps that must be accounted for. Did they move since their previous emergence? Or were they just not documented in certain places last time?

By encouraging careful listening, Negin Almassi, resource management training specialist at the Forest Preserves of Cook County, is leading a volunteer effort to map the range and abundance of 17-year periodical cicadas across the county based on the intensity of their sounds.

“What’s special about them is that the cicadas we’re hearing this year are giving us a window into what’s happened in the last 17,” Almassi said. “That means that (conditions) aligned for them in these places.”

For instance, cicadas will have emerged where trees have remained healthy and soil undisturbed. The soundmap project has also asked volunteers to pay attention to other sounds, such as how other animals might have changed the frequency of their signaling while cicadas chorus loudly. That attentiveness has also attuned them to human noise pollution.

“One of the first things that this project has shown me is how much I tune out airplanes, and how ubiquitous and loud they actually are,” Almassi said. “You get used to your acoustic environment.”

The environmental educator also recently led a few “Cicaca Soundwalks” near the Sagawau Environmental Learning Center in Lemont alongside the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. Like the listening session that Power led at Illinois State, sound walks are meant to help folks slow down and tune in to the sounds of nature they often ignore.

“Figuring out what to identify as music versus noise, that’s the question,” Almassi said.