“I think they're going to kick me out after an hour,” Andrew Skeoch said. “So it will be a very, very brief introduction into a huge subject.”

But after more than two decades as a professional bioacoustic researcher, Mr Skeoch has compiled recordings which illustrate millions of years of evolution in a matter of seconds. 

“Birds and animals use sound to communicate and the actual sounds that they use have evolved for specific reasons,” he said.

“So when you listen to a chorus of crickets on a summer evening, you're hearing a sound which is probably 400-million-years-old and hasn't changed an awful lot in that time – it’s a very simple sound. 

“Whereas if you listen to a magpie warbling, you're hearing a highly-evolved bird song which has been evolving for the last tens-of-millions-of-years – it’s using sound in very particular ways to communicate. 

“So what you're actually hearing are stories that tell us about how creatures have journeyed to what we hear and see today.” 

Mr Skeoch’s audience will also hear the guttural bellows of hippopotami and the songs of European nightingales.

But the first audio he will play was recorded on his own property, a bush block south of Newstead. 

Which raised the obvious question of the soundscape recordist – what are his favourite sounds from central Victoria?

The bronzewing pigeon

“That’s like asking a musician what is their favourite bit of music!” he said. “They’ll have so many – music is their whole life.”  

“It’s difficult, for instance, when I hear a bronze wing pigeon call, I'm hearing a bird that is about two octaves below what it should do for its body size – it’s got the same body size as a magpie but it sure doesn't sound like a magpie –  so I’m fascinated by how this bird producing this booming, ‘woom woom’ call out of such a small body.

“I love it, simply because I’ve got beyond the novelty of hearing it.”

The chestnut-rumped heathwren

“Then there’s the rare ones, like the chestnut-rumped heathwren,” Mr Skeoch said.

“Because they’re fabulous mimics, and you can just listen to them going through one bush bird song after another – they’re really like tiny little lyre birds.

“We've got chestnut-rumped heathwrens here at our house, they’re a relatively uncommon bird, so to have them hanging around the house is really nice.”

Babblers

“Babblers just really have a good chatter with each other, and they're articulation of sounds is really quite extraordinary,” he said.

“There’s a bit of research going on into them now, saying that the Australian babblers are the first songbird that’s been thought to use syntax in their calls, which has previously been thought to be a human invention.

“So I'm listening to our local babblers and going, are you guys syntaxing?”

Little eagles

“Little eagles have a really characteristic call, when you hear it coming from the sky above you, and you look up and think ‘it must be up there somewhere,’ and eventually you see a tiny dot a kilometre up,” he said.

“It’s little things like that I love.”

Corellas

“Most people think corellas sound ghastly,” Mr Skeoch said.

“But they’re actually really cute, they’ve got lovely, bubbly calls and when a flock of corellas goes overhead it brings a smile.

“So it’s common sounds, rare sounds...it’s life around you – and it’s a wonderful thing to connect with life around you.”

Why you should open your ears to the sounds of nature

The bioacoustic researcher said he aimed to teach people how to start listening to the nature around them – and promised rich rewards for those who learnt to open their ears.

“I go back to first principles,” he said. 

“We're a living creature and we're immersed in a living environment in the planet – we're surrounded by other life forms.

“Now you can ignore all that and you can just live in a human world, but it seems to me that you are really missing the point of being alive.

“To actually engage with life around you – that's what we're here to do.

“So how do you do that? Well you can just go for a walk and have a nice time and kind of look at it all, but when you're listening, you're hearing stuff going on...sound is all about activity and things happening.

“So when you hear a little buzzing coming from up in the treetops, if you know what that buzzing is, you'll say, ‘ah there's a little flock of weebills up there,’ and sure enough you look up and, yup there they are.

“It connects you with things, you can hear what's going on, you can hear the behaviour, you can read the story of what you're hearing in a way that is far more engaging than just looking.

“It’s a lovely way of doing things and, also, sound is so emotional and evocative – when you hear a sound it has quite an emotional resonance for us.” 

Andrew Skeoch will talk at the Bendigo Library from 6pm tonight. Book here.