The sound of the forest on your mobile | The traveler

To describe a hoot, whistle or whisper, there are onomatopoeias and analogies. But before the lexicon, what is needed is to know and know how to be in nature. Carlos de Hita does with sound what many columnists do with life: he hunts down a detail and tells a story. “A rain that soaks and does not sound, beyond an imperceptible murmur of millions of drops that fall from the trees. It is the horizontal rain that distills persistent mist, the air turned into water ”, is the sound macrophotography that the sound engineer and author of Visual and sound journey through the forests of Spain (Editorial Anaya Touring) Capture of the lime forest and water ravine on the Canary Island of La Palma. His is a stereo book. By scanning QR codes with a mobile phone, the reader can listen to what he reads. These visual and acoustic recordings are carried out equipped with microphones and a digital recorder. The closer you are to the source, the more your sonograms look. A graphic representation of sound contained in 74 QR codes and abstract drawings of the tones and volume of the intricacies of a forest ridge.

The distance is silent to the sound. Even the white silence of the Cantabrian beech forests of Liébana absorbs his mic mounted on a parabolic reflector. A contraption reminiscent of the inverted cone worn by some dogs after having undergone surgery. Carlos de Hita (Madrid, 1959) knows that a snowflake is almost mute, but the fall of many of them, added to the creaking of the broken branches, the hissing and hammering of blackbirds, the throat of a great tit and, In the background, the clicking of a band of red-billed choughs is a roar. De Hita is the Miguel Delibes of sound waves. He records and describes the sound that surrounds him; the Valladolid novelist wrote about life in the countryside. One listens, the other listened, the dialogues of the earth with and between its inhabitants. What they do and did is supported by a rich, simple and rooted lexicon. His words sound like an extinct world, an ecosystem populated and flown over by birds that bear in their names the onomatopoeias of the sounds they emit: the turtledoves coo tur tur, owls scare with their this this, scops seem English when pronouncing aut aut and the finches whistle pin pin. Vocabulary that emanates from the attention people used to pay to things around them. Creative and playful people, like the voice of a blue tit bird, are the ones that gave its name to the contradictory toponymy of the Valsaín forest, on the north slope of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Carlos de Hita lives, knows and recites this valley of Segovian pines: “From Navalparaíso to the Valdeinfierno stream there is only a stretch. An excursion from Buenos Aires and the Sabrosa slope to the Reventón port and the Quebrantaherraduras pass. Passing through the Plains of Accident, the Corrals of the Desperate, the streams of Fear and the Devil’s Soul ”.

De Hita spends more time assembling everything recorded in his studio than outdoors. Under the sky, in the open, between trees and rocks, it has been on the lookout for 30 years for hums, melopeas, crocites and any sound that propagates in those wooded soundboards that are the forests. The inhabitants of the same are at the same time musicians, instruments and suppliers: firewood, charcoal, wood and cork. Navarra and Gipuzkoa share the Sierra de Aralar and the Sakana Valley, floating forests and shipwrecks. With the wood of its oaks, white pines, elms, holm oaks, beeches and firs, keels, rods, elbows, frames, varengas, oars and the mastelery of the ships that sailed the seas were built when Spain was what a few today yearn for. And the ends were made with hemp. From the soft surface of the cork oaks of the Cádiz mountain of La Almoraima comes the cork with which the Catalan winemakers make the corks of the cava bottles.

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