Vancouver Sun

Times Square now more of a jungle

- KEVIN GRIFFIN kevingriff­in@postmedia.com twitter.com/ kevincgrif­fin

With the help of a platform developed by a Vancouver company, people walking around Times Square in Manhattan are listening to the diverse sounds of the Amazonian jungle.

It’s an example of how digital technology is being used to link a threatened natural jungle with a vibrant urban one.

The project is called Jungle-ized. It came together after David de Rothschild, a wealthy British explorer, funded a group, led by sound artist Francisco Lopez, to go to the rainforest of the Amazon River in Peru to record sounds of the jungle, said Peter Wittig, one of the co-founders and senior developer with the Vancouver startup Motive.io. Ryan Chapman, president, and Jeff Macpherson, creative director, are the other two co-founders.

Lopez recorded incredibly diverse soundscape­s in locations that included the Mamori swamp at night and the Yanayacu forest at dusk. The creative team then used the platform Motive.io to geo-locate sounds in and around Times Square in Manhattan, Wittig said.

“As you walk from one block to another, you hear different sounds,” Wittig said in Vancouver.

“They used our editor to say, for example, ‘I want this sound to appear on this corner.’ As you walk a little farther, ‘I want that sound to transition to a sound of a waterfall,’ and if you walk a bit farther, it transition­s into another sound — maybe a certain bird call.”

The Jungle-ized soundscape, composed by Soundwalk Collective, continues daily to the end of April.

Jungle-ized expects heightened interest on Friday, which is Earth Day and also the full moon.

From noon to midnight, passersby in Times Square can download the Jungle-ized mobile app and take a self-guided aural tour in a eight-block area. People can borrow high-quality headphones that let them listen to a soundscape of an Amazonian ecosystem.

Sounds include Shipibo shamans, howler monkeys, tree frogs and narration by Amazon experts Jeremy Narby and Daniel Pinchbeck.

The Shipibo people are known as masters of ayahuasca, a powerful entheogeni­c brew used in indigenous spirituali­ty.

Nightly throughout April, the Jungle-ized video will be shown on the electronic billboards around Times Square, starting at 11:57 p.m.

The video was shot along the 73rd meridian west, which connects Times Square with the Peruvian Amazon.

Wittig said the appeal of Motive.io is that it allows storytelle­rs and artists to program the experience of an app without having to learn code.

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