Grubengeräusche_EN

The Messel Pit is famous for its fossils – in fact it is even world-famous. Thirty years ago, the site just outside Darmstadt became a World Heritage Site because it makes fascinating traces of the past understandable and tangible. Students at h_da have now used field recording to explore current – rather than past – life in the pit. The result of their work is a sound exhibition entitled “Recent / Living”, which visitors to the Messel Pit can listen to up until 18 July.

By Daniel Timme, 10.7.2025

“In a sense, field recording is the ultimate recording method,” says Felix Krückels, Professor of Broadcast Production and System Design on h_da’s Media Campus. “It’s very challenging. You have to anticipate what might happen – especially when animals are involved. It’s a very good exercise as far as sound engineering is concerned.” He is familiar with the obstacles that can suddenly stand in the way “in the field”.

“Out here, the deciding factor is not the best microphone but your own ears. It’s important to listen closely and try things out,” explains lecturer Nils Mosh. “It’s a different kind of work from in the recording studio. When recording in the field, you have to take the necessary technical steps to ensure that animals, the onset of rain or you yourself do not disturb the sound.” Last but not least, he says, you ought to know and understand what you are listening to.

Nils Mosh is a field recordist, sound artist and lecturer at h_da for the Field Recording Elective in the Sound, Music and Production study programme. During the summer semester and under his guidance, ten students explored a famous yet surprisingly little-known place between the h_da campuses in Darmstadt and Dieburg: the Messel Pit. In April, they began capturing the acoustic diversity of flora and fauna with various microphones and condensing them into artistic sound installations – which visitors to the pit can now listen to up until 18 July.

At the opening of “Recent / Living – Sound Installations” on 4 July, Dr Lukardis Wencker, Head of PR & Marketing at the Messel Pit, reminded the audience that the pit had narrowly escaped becoming a refuse dump after oil shale mining ended. Luckily, the site’s significance as a fossil deposit was recognised, and the crater was not re-naturalised, as is usually the case with open-cast mines. 47 million years ago, when mammalian evolution had just begun, the Messel crater, a volcanic lake or “maar”, became a graveyard for plants and animals. It was the fossils found here that earned the Messel Pit its status as Germany’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. To this day, excavations continue to unearth very well-preserved fossils of animals and plants.

That is why the core business of the Messel Pit, whose logo features a prehistoric horse, is, of course, fossils. However, the team is equally aware of the “recent”, the “currently still living or occurring”, because it is a place of tremendous biodiversity. “The collaboration with h_da is a great opportunity to combine teaching and biodiversity,” praised Wencker. She also thanked the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Arts and Culture, which is funding the project.

Gathering qualitative impressions of biodiversity was an important element of the Field Recording Elective. What’s more, the particular acoustics due to the pit’s cauldron shape were very exciting for the sound experts. That is why sound in three-dimensional space was one of the course’s core topics, explains Mosh: “How does the sound change when I move around or away? What can other people still hear?” When Mosh talks about his work, his choice of words (“look at the recording”) point to another important aspect: the close interplay between hearing and seeing. “If you look with your ears, then afterwards you see things in a completely different way,” he says.

Who or what lives here – and what do they sound like? From April onwards, the students cast their acoustic “fishing rods” in search of answers: mono, stereo and surround microphones, shotgun microphones, contact microphones and hydrophones for underwater recordings. How deeply they delved into the topic can be seen from the example of a dung beetle: with the help of a blade of grass and a contact microphone, they succeeded in making its feeding noises audible – in a pile of wild boar droppings. With special permission, the elective was allowed to position its microphones in the pit overnight, when entry is normally prohibited.

In this way, the students were able to capture fascinating sounds in the evening and at dawn: of large and small mammals, amphibians, birds, insects and plants. From this and from individual recordings in and around the Messel Pit, they distilled nine very different sound compositions in several elaborate steps. Their approaches are sometimes documentary, sometimes educational, sometimes artistic/abstract, with manual skills and sound art individually metered. Together with the students, visitors attending the opening of the exhibition listened to the nine installations on the outdoor sound system, which was arranged in a circle.

For example, there is Mouaz Sultan’s audio walk starting at Messel Station, with sounds of trains and barriers followed by footsteps, birds, insects, trees rustling in the wind – and the acoustic immersion in the pond in front of the museum. Maira Weeke and Liv Hesse have captured, for example, the sounds of frogs and various birds in the evening and at night – and granted roebuck, wild boar and cuckoo short guest appearances. Tom Kienzlen has processed the sounds of chiffchaffs, field crickets, wild boar and bats to create something like a radio play for children and added enriching details.

“Normally, the sounds that bats make are inaudible for us humans,” says Felix Krückels, explaining the technical side. “But with special microphones, we can make analogue recordings of higher frequency ranges. We can then lower the pitch to frequencies that we can hear and by so doing extend our range of perception.” In varying playback speed, Elisabeth Klingenberg, who focused on the sounds of a particular species of dragonfly in flight, used another impressive stylistic device. What emerges alternately from one of the five loudspeakers reminds some people in the audience of the characteristic sound of twin-cylinder motorbikes.

For the opening of the exhibition, the students also set up live listening stations around the Messel Pit Museum – on the grass, under a tree and by the pond. The objects and sound sources are everything they studied within their elective from an acoustics perspective: trees, bird calls and insects, bees, the soil or the underwater world. Via headphones, visitors can listen in real time to what the sensitive sound technology captures.

The microphone, which lies in the reeds at the edge of the museum pond, transports the sounds of gentle splashing, buzzing insects and birdsong, but also of people chattering. Just two metres away, a hydrophone submerged in the lake exposes a completely different world to its listeners: there is permanent background noise under the surface of the water. Here and there you can hear something nibbling (but it is not clear what). And then there is a sound rather like effervescence. “It’s bubbles rising up as a result of photosynthesis on aquatic plants,” explain Liv Hesse and Maira Weeke. The listening stations give laypeople a feeling of how tricky it is to capture sounds. “Field recording often calls for great patience,” says Nils Mosh. “It’s quite normal not to hear anything for the first five minutes – but that can also be the case for two hours.”

This meant there was a long way to go before the sound installations were finished. For the nighttime recordings, the group set up their microphones in the afternoon after 5 p.m. and then recorded what happened in the pit overnight until 10 a.m. the next morning. Many hours of material, partly on several audio tracks – listening to it all took a correspondingly long time. “I always recommend listening carefully to the whole of the first hour before anything else,” says Mosh, “to get a feel for the noises and sounds.” Dirk Dullmaier did exactly that and says: “It makes sense! Things suddenly happen at night that you don’t expect. Then you have first of all to identify what you’ve recorded. That’s how you spot an absolute gem here and there.”

When listening, as Dullmaier confirms, seeing is also important: “The swings in amplitude on the frequency band indicate when a new sound occurs or when it gets louder.” The following therefore often applies here: see first what you are presumably hearing, then listen to the recording. Listening and looking with ears and eyes was followed by artistic sound work. The students used sound technology to decide what they wanted to highlight. “This process is very subjective, a lot of decisions have to be pieced together,” says Mosh. It is essential that vision and goal are both clear. That is why the elective called for sound engineering and artistic skills, knowledge of biology to understand the recorded material, creativity – and great patience.

Nils Mosh thanked the Messel Pit team for actively supporting the project and the students for their dedication and fantastic work. “It was unbelievably enriching to do this together with you.” Elisabeth Klingenberg, one of the students involved, felt the same: “We profited a lot from doing this with Nils. He was incredibly enthusiastic.”