Question: What do you hope to achieve with linking your project to music?

Tom Dally answered on 12 Mar 2020:

It’s more sound than music that I use, but I wanted to try and use sound to identify insects because it can be quite difficult to identify them by sight. Citizen science (using volunteers to collect data, like you or your parents) is becoming a popular way to gather data on animals like insects, but most volunteers don’t have much experience with identifying insects – they can be quite difficult to identify, even under a microscope. So I wanted to know if we could use the sound of their wing beats to identify them instead, so that citizen scientists wouldn’t have to rely so much on sight. It’s really important that the data we gather is as accurate as possible, so that we can work out whether some insects are in trouble or not.
I do know some people in the music department here at Leeds who are using insect (and other environmental sounds) to make music, though!