Music Made with Bees
Ever wondered what music made with bees would sound like? The bee produces about 200-230 wing flaps pr. second, which is enough to generate a nice, rich sounding buzz. We recorded a bunch of bee sounds and manipulated them through a variety of tools (including timefreezers, delays, filters, glitch modules etc). We then decided to add some more human elements to it (vocals, guitars, grooves etc) and wrapped it up by adding full symphony orchestra and choirs on it during the end. While these little creatures can seem insignificant – they do make the world go around and they have a keystone role in the ecosystem. So while the world is concerned with celebrity culture and facebook updates – we decided to send our respect to all the bees in the world and see how far we could take them into the realm of music. Besides the bee sounds – the majority of samples are coming from our own 8DIO sample catalog including: Forgotten Voices: Cait, Mini and our Requiem library. We hoped you liked the video & music – feel free to purchase our track on Itunes if you dig it. Peace out to all the honeys and bumbles.
Feel free to check the articles below, which shows what the press thought about our experiment.
Bee Specifications:
- Approx. 20.000 known species of bees
- The honey bee has been around for millions of years.
- Honey bees, scientifically also known as Apis mellifera, are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.
- It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
- Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it’s the only food that contains “pinocembrin”, an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
- Honey bees have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
- Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell is so precise they camdifferentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.
- The honey bee’s wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
- The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
- A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.The queen bee can live up to 5 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day
