Nature becomes a musician, starts making royalties

When Paul McCartney was putting the finishing touches to Blackbird in 1968, he called up the EMI sound effects library and requested a tape labelled Volume Seven: Birds of Feather.

As a result, the final song features the melodic chirp of a male blackbird, originally recorded in the garden of sound engineer Stuart Eltham three years earlier.

The effect was so intrinsic to the track's bucolic atmosphere that some fans believed McCartney had recorded it live on the roof of Abbey Road studios.

It's just one example of how the sounds of nature can enhance music - from the satisfying thundercrunch that opens Enya's Storms in Africa II, to the twilight cricket-song that underscores Missy Elliott's The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).

"As soon as you wake up, hearing the trees, that's music," explained Elliott's producer Timbaland last year.

"Hearing the crickets, that's music. I always wanted to use nature to be in my songs, just things that we see every day, things that we hear every day."

Those sounds often went uncredited, however... until now.

A new initiative from the United Nations will see nature recognised as an official artist on major streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music.

Artists who use natural sounds in their recordings can choose to list "Nature" as a featured artist - and a share of their profits will be distributed to environmental causes.

"It's a way of saying to artists, 'We all use sounds like seagulls and waves and wind. Why don't we pay nature a royalty?'" says Brian Eno, who has remixed his David Bowie collaboration Get Real for the project.

"Hopefully it'll be a river, or a torrent, or a flood of royalties - and then what we do is distribute that among groups of people who are working on projects to help us deal with the future."

Artists who have contributed songs to the first wave of releases include London Grammar, MØ, Tom Walker and Ellie Goulding, who has updated her song Brightest Blue with the calls of speckled chachalacas and Amazonian oropendolas.

Alt-pop star Aurora is also releasing a new track, A Soul With No King, featuring the sounds of lush, dense forests inher native Norway.

"I feel like music has the ability to make contact with nature seem desirable again," says the singer, best known in the UK for her 2015 John Lewis advert. "Because, somewhere deep inside our soul, we are really yearning for it."

"It's such a thrill working with non-musical sources," adds Eno.

"Most of the instruments we work with are designed to behave themselves [but] natural sounds are sort of raw, they're wild elements.

"You have to make a decision about whether you are going to make them sound more like instruments, or whether you're going to pull the music towards those things. And I think the second option is, actually, kind of more interesting."

On Get Real, he does just that - heightening the paranoia of Bowie's lyrics with the abrasive sounds of hyenas, bees and wild pigs.

"They sound quite angry, don't they?" Eno laughs.

Called Sounds Right, the project is the brainchild of the Museum for the United Nations - UN Live. which hopes it will raise $40m (£32m) in its first four years.

"The dream is that any artist who's interested in collaborating with nature is able to visit our website, download nature samples and tag nature on their tracks, with a portion of the royalties donated to high impact conservation initiatives," says programme director Gabriel Smales.

Nature's "artist page" on Spotify will also include ambient recordings of the planet, from rainforests to ocean sounds. For those tracks, at least 70% of the profits will fund conservation programmes, says Smales.

Eno, who is world renowned as a founding member of Roxy Music and a pioneer of ambient music, is a key part of the project through his EarthPercent charity.

Founded in 2021, the organisation works with the music industry to support "credible and impactful" environmental organisations - and will also distribute the money generated by Sounds Right.

Those projects are chosen by an independent advisory panel, whose members include Prof Brian Cox, climate scientist Prof Tamsin Edwards, and Nnimmo Bassey, former chair of Friends of the Earth.

Current targets include preservation efforts in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean islands, as well as efforts to prevent deep-sea mining.

Eno and Aurora share a belief that music can make a difference to the planet without "preaching" about climate change.

"If you're listening to a beautiful piece of music, you're hearing the possibility of a good world that we could be in," says Eno.

"That's how art changes people. It gives us aspirations that we wouldn't have otherwise."

Aurora adds: "It's much easier to engage people when they feel a part of something. I think only art can make people understand how deep and spiritual this connection with nature should be."

However, scientists argue that urgent action can limit the worst effects - and Eno and Aurora can both see reasons to remain optimistic.

"What gives me hope is that, for kids younger than myself, the conversation around the environment is so obvious," says Aurora.

"They're angry and determined and strongly opinionated [about] how the way forward has to be different.

"It helps me realise not everything I care for has to happen immediately. It's enough to just be a part of a slow process."

"I completely agree," says Eno. "I feel that we're in the middle of an enormous revolution.

"It shows in the very small things that people do. Their distaste for waste, for example. The feeling that irresponsible consumerism is actually not very pleasant.

"It just doesn't feel good to be so fickle in our tastes - to have to have new shoes every couple of weeks because somebody else has got them. I think people are starting to develop away from that."

Eno is also a voracious reader of scientific periodicals, and says the advances being made on climate change are another reason to feel hopeful, even if they rarely penetrate the mainstream.

More importantly, he adds, the infrastructure that perpetuated our exploitation of the planet is slowly being dismantled.

"Old people like me are dying," he says. "The people who run the fossil fuel companies, the people who pay advertising companies to tell lies about what is really happening [in the environment] are on their way out.

"I don't think they have a platform in the future. So here's to death!"