Cát Tiên National Park's calming bird songs, insect cries, and rushing waters are now available as a customizable, uninterrupted soundscape for your listening pleasure.
The soothing noises of the beloved southern forest is made possible because of a collaboration between Vietnam Sound Library and MyNoise, an online repository of “interactive soundscapes and customizable noise generators designed to promote focus, sleep, relaxation, and effective sound masking,” accessed by over 15,000 people a day.
The page for the “Cát Tiên” channel on MyNoise
Users can listen to uninterrupted, consistent sounds of the national park's nature and manually adjust levels for nine specific elements, including distant rapids, stream, rainwashed birds, canopy life, and morning cicadas. Several presets, including Forest Depths, Morning Birds, and Forest Heat, optimize the balances for different listening experiences. One can easily imagine them playing softly in a coffee shop that fosters studying and focused work, a spa lobby, or a bedroom on a slow morning when one yearns to escape the city's concrete stage clips.
Of the collaboration, Stéphane Pigeon, MyNoise's founder and operator, explains: “About a year ago, I received a kind email from Vietnam. Khoa, a sound recordist from Saigon, wanted to share his recordings with me. I answered right away, enthusiastic... and then, nothing. Silence for almost a year. Then one day, a beautiful collection arrived in my inbox, together with an apology for the long silence and an explanation. At the time of his first email, Khoa's recordings were mostly urban soundscapes and, in his own words, not quite in the spirit of myNoise. So instead of sending what he had, he decided to go out and record what he felt myNoise deserved. What he brought back is a summer forest in Cát Tiên National Park, in southern Vietnam, one of the richest lowland forests left in the region. I could hear the effort in those files the very first time I played them. They needed very little from me: a distant plane removed here, a few faraway voices there, and the forest was ready to breathe on myNoise!”
Khoa busy at work preparing sounds. Photo by Jimmy Art Devier.
Saigonee recently profiled Vietnam Sound Library, so we are surprised by the focus or quality of the recordings. Khoa and Thủy, the duo behind the project, have been amassing a tremendous library of Vietnamese sounds to support Khoa's work as a film sound designer as well as a matter of preserving the nation's culture as expressed via everyday audio. When we visited their studio, Saigoneer got a sneak peek at the audios recorded in Cát Tiên, which were ultimately used in the recent movie Nghỉ hè sợ nghỉ hưu ( Meets Hero).
The sounds of Cát Tiên fit in perfectly in an archive that includes ambient noise from waterfalls, Japanese gardens, purring cats, and much more, including albums found on popular streaming sites. Free for personal use, the archive began as a passion project by Pigeon, a signal processing engineer with a strong passion for sounds. Its success has allowed him to focus on it full-time.
