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Many listeners have been fascinated by a recording that was supposedly produced from slowed-down tapes of crickets chirping, producing something that sounds remarkably like a human chorus: Musician Tom Waits referenced this piece of cricket music in a 2008 NPR interview as the most interesting recording he owned: What listeners are hearing is often touted as being nothing more than a simple two-track recording of crickets, with crickets chirping at normal speed on one track and greatly slowed-down recordings of crickets (said to be slowed down to match and mirror the length of the average lifespan of a human being) chirping on the other. How much the original recordings of crickets were manipulated (beyond simply slowing them down) to produce this work is a topic that has sparked considerable debate, with some confusion apparently stemming from the fact that this recording exists in multiple forms. Apparently the cricket sounds were originally recorded by the late Native American producer/musician Jim Wilson and used, with overdubbed lyrical narration, for the song Twisted Hair (also known as Ballad of the Twisted Hair) which was issued on a spoken word and musical exploration album credited to Wilson's Little Wolf Band (along with Wilson's uncle, David Carson). An extended, digitally remixed and mastered version of the cricket recordings was also issued on Wilson's CD release God's Chorus of Crickets, described as follows: However, a version of Twisted Hair also appeared the album Music for Native Americans by Robbie Robertson and The Red Road Ensemble, and that version featured additional overdubbing by Native American opera singer Bonnie Jo Hunt, who explained in a 2004 interview with NPR how she was approached by Robertson to overdub her voice onto the track: Various listeners have therefore been exposed to different versions of this piece, some of which feature the additional human vocal overdubbing. (The most commonly circulated versions seem to be ones which do not include Bonnie Jo Hunt's added vocals, though.) Nonetheless, even if the original recording featured nothing other than the sounds of crickets chirping, exactly what was done to those sounds to create the finished piece remains a subject of contention. Critics contend that Wilson didn't simply slow down a continuous recording of crickets chirping; they interpret his statement that he slowed down this recording to various levels and Bonnie Joe Hunt's reference to Wilson's lowering the pitch several times to mean that he used multiple recordings of crickets, each slowed down by a different amount to produce a specific pitch, and layered them to create a melodic effect sounding like a well-trained church choir.
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