Stewart Copeland and Martyn Stewart Are Turning Endangered Animal Sounds Into Orchestral Music

Imagine a world gone quiet — no frog song rising from a marsh at dusk, no owls calling through old growth forests, no hyenas cackling across an open plain. That silence is not some distant dystopia. It is creeping closer every year, and two remarkable collaborators are doing something deeply moving to push back against it.

Stewart Copeland, the legendary drummer behind The Police, and Martyn Stewart, a naturalist who has spent more than six decades recording wildlife across the globe, have joined forces to create “Wild Concerto,” an album that places animals front and center as the true performers. Humans, for once, are simply the backup band.

According to CBS News, Martyn Stewart amassed nearly 100,000 recordings across his lifetime of fieldwork, driven by a conviction that sound is the most honest measure of planetary health. Frogs reveal the condition of wetlands. Birds signal the state of entire ecosystems. When those voices fade, something irreplaceable is being lost.

His archive holds some of the most heartbreaking audio on Earth — including the last known recording of the Panamanian golden frog, a species now considered critically endangered, and the haunting calls of the northern white rhinoceros, now gone from the wild entirely. These are not just sounds. They are eulogies waiting to be heard.

Copeland, whose musical imagination has always moved between rock and classical worlds, spent enormous time wading through thousands of hours of field recordings to find the voices that deserved an orchestral stage. He found that the raw, unscripted sounds of creatures naturally suggested which instruments should accompany them — the animals were composing too, in their own way.

What makes this project so powerful is its underlying faith that beauty can move people where statistics cannot. If listeners fall in love with the laugh of a hyena or the chorus of a rainforest at dawn, they may fight harder to protect the nature that produces those sounds. Art becomes activism, and wonder becomes a form of Conservation.

Video Source: 60 Minutes/Youtube

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