Planet City had unintended side effects on the population’s mental health.
While nature was able to grow wild, the minds of the city’s inhabitants, cut off from this wildness, lacked the essential access to nature necessary for their mental and cultural survival. For their rituals to have meaning, beyond the cold slap of concrete on the bottom of their feet, they needed to feel an expanse.
A solution was devised: an elite troop of remote field-recordists were assembled to track the wilds and embed audio technologies across the planet’s sectors and quadrants, so that the inhabitants could feel, by sound, the planet’s vastness. These were transmitted into small listening stations, called biophilic-sound-pods, in which the listener could switch across different biomes.
In this particular sample five 1-minute examples can be heard:
a school of birds drinking at a remote waterhole in the Southern quadrant.
the sounds of intertidal crustaceans in the North-West sector.
a rushing stream also in the North-West sector.
the movement of strands of melaleuca trees in the Northern quadrant
the crashing waves and underwater backwash of the Eastern oceans.
Switching across these different biomes, the listener imagines themselves to be beyond the walls of Planet City, exploring the wilds. This gives them some solace in the face of endless enclosure.