Cicadas in Love!

Phew! I’m a little late, but that’s what happens when you: get up late, pack, go on a 4 1/2 hour road trip, go out to dinner for your birthday, drink two margaritas, and then sit down to compose. 😉

And this was the first day that I actually had done a little bit of advance preparation. During the summer, McDoc and I became interested in the sounds of cicadas that we could hear in our neighborhood, and we did a bit of online research and found a site that had several sound files of different species of cicadas. I thought the sounds had wonderful musical potential, so I wrote to the scientists to ask permission to use them. They very kindly said yes.

I hope they don’t regret it after hearing the piece.

I heard a particular musical reference in one of the cicada sounds, and I went with it. It’s very silly, I know, but I couldn’t resist…

It is my birthday, after all… you can blame the margaritas! 🙂

Special thanks to John Cooley and David Marshall of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, and Mark O’Brien of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, for granting me permission to use their cicada sound files.

Click play to listen:

[audio:http://missmusicnerd.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/audio/CicadasinLove.mp3|titles=Cicadas in Love]

Thanks for listening!