EVERY SOUND IN NATURE IS MUSIC

"Appearing LIVE and in REAL TIME
at a computer near you "

For those city dwellers feeling deprived of the lack of action from the 17-year-old cicadas you can now access the mating " Concerto of the Cicadas " by clicking on : nujust.net/~locusonus/site/streams/mapcreacast.php. You will see a world map with the lowest box by Chicago, colored orange , if the audio stream is on. ( The male cicadas only vibrate between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m..) When the new box appears, click start.

The sound has decibel levels that rival the Chicago Symphony orchestra's brass section at full blast.

This concerto is the brain child of Peter Gena, a composer and pianist and teacher of electronic and computer music at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gena lives near the forest preserve which has large wooded areas full of cicadas and he has only to go to his backyard with a microphone to capture the sonic symphony.

Professor Gena is a believer in the words of John Cage, Twentieth century's avant-garde music guru that " everything we do -and , by extension, every sound in nature-is music. All we have to do is listen to our environment and listen to someone working with the sounds around us. "

So, from dawn to dusk until the end of June the sonic symphony that marks the demise of one generation of the cicadas and the eventual rebirth of another will continue.