The Early Bird Sound Map will be featured at YARMONICS sound festival in Great Yarmouth. You’ll be able to catch the dawn chorus sounds over the tannoy of Great Yarmouth’s Market Gates Shopping Centre on Saturday 26th September.
Produced in partnership by Eastern Ear (formerly the Norfolk and Norwich Sonic Arts Collective) and originalprojects; YARMONICS is a free sonic art and new music festival that celebrates the sounds, people and places of Great Yarmouth. It features installations, performances, workshops with local groups and talks. YARMONICS has invited a number of sound artists, musicians, writers and artists to create work that responds to specific spaces and places in Great Yarmouth
The Early Bird Sound Map is a collection of bird song and dawn chorus recordings from around the Waveney and Blyth river valleys, and surrounding towns and villages, along the Norfolk and Suffolk border. The recordings were made by members, friends and supporters of W&BA in May 2020, including some from people residing outside of our patch.
Sunday 3rd May 2020 was International Dawn Chorus Day. It would have also been the first event of our ‘Celebrate’ 2020 programme – a Dawn Chorus walk at the gorgeously tranquil Kaliwoods, near Halesworth. Due to the COVID-19 situation, we were unable to host this event. As we couldn’t be together for International Dawn Chorus Day, we asked our W&BA members and those living in/around our patch to record their own home-based dawn chorus experience to send to us for the Early Bird Sound Map.
At W&BA, our aim is to create opportunities for people to experience the environment, habitats and species in our patch through the arts. We are driven to do what we can to protect and preserve habitats, and believe the time to act on climate crisis is now.

Early Bird Sound Map example
The purpose of the Early Bird Sound Map is not only to produce a record of this time, but to encourage people to feel connected to the natural world and therefore feel compelled to live in a way which respects and protects the environment now and in the future. Whilst the COVID-19 situation has been distressing and worrying for us all, animal, bird and plant species have been thriving in the quiet days and nights.
Head over to the Early Bird Sound Map page, under Events, to listen in…