A voice for the animal kingdom
Animal Frequency
There are some encounters that change the way you see another life. And somehow, the way you see your own.
I've spent more than 25 years working professionally with the human voice, fascinated by why one voice can reach us while another, saying exactly the same words, doesn't. Tone, rhythm, breath, intention and all the things we hear and feel before we've consciously decided what we think.
For most of my life, I've also felt an enormous pull towards animals.
For years I thought these were simply two separate parts of me. One became my profession. The other took me around the world, sometimes to extraordinary wild places and sometimes into the much harder reality of animals whose lives had been shaped by human choices.
I don't think they're separate anymore.
Animal Frequency is where those worlds meet.
What I noticed
I kept noticing what happened to me.
Over years of encounters with wild, rescued and everyday animals, I began to notice how different I felt around them.
Sometimes very little was happening at all, yet I could become completely absorbed by another animal. I wasn't thinking about how I was coming across or trying to achieve anything. There was nothing to prove and, wonderfully, nothing was being asked of me.
For somebody who had spent a great deal of her life learning how to perform, adapt and get things right, that began to feel significant.
I wanted to understand why.
Resonance
I've worked with resonance for most of my professional life, although I wouldn't always have called it that. I've known instinctively that a voice is never only the words being spoken. There's something underneath them that we respond to, sometimes before we've had time to understand why.
And perhaps that's why I've become so fascinated by what happens between us and animals.
I've had encounters where I've understood perfectly well what I was seeing, and others that have left me with far more questions than answers. How did you know I was there? What did you sense that I couldn't? Why can the presence of another animal make everything else disappear for a moment and leave us feeling so extraordinarily alive?
The more I learn about the ways animals communicate through sound, movement, scent, vibration and senses quite different from our own, the more curious I become. But I don't want knowledge to explain away the awe. I'm interested in that beautiful space between what we're discovering and what we still don't understand.
Perhaps some things are allowed to remain a little mysterious.
What they have shown me
Animals have changed me, gradually and profoundly.
They've made me question how much of my own life I've spent anticipating, analysing, performing and trying to force what comes next. In their presence I've experienced something much simpler: attention, instinct, curiosity and that wonderful feeling of being completely there.
I don't believe animals are here to provide humans with life lessons. But if we're willing to pay attention, I think they have an extraordinary amount to show us.
And somewhere along the way, my curiosity changed direction too.
I stopped only asking what an encounter with an animal could reveal about me, and became increasingly fascinated by the life looking back.
What are you experiencing? What matters to you? How do you communicate? What do you know about this world that I will never perceive in quite the same way?
That question is at the heart of Animal Frequency.
Because I don't want to take wisdom, wonder and joy from the animal kingdom while remaining indifferent to what happens to it.
I've seen some of the consequences of our relationship with other species through my time with organisations working with rescued bears, elephants and rhinos. Of course information and conservation matter, but I think something else happens when another animal stops being an abstract idea and becomes a life we feel connected to.
Perhaps we don't protect the natural world simply because we've been told we should.
Perhaps we protect it because, somewhere along the way, we fell in love with it.
And really, that's what I want Animal Frequency to create more of.
Not answers to every mystery. More curiosity. More encounters. More awe. More of those moments when you look at another living being and can only think, how extraordinary that you're here.