Stuart Hyatt listens to music wherever he goes. Hear an exhilarating rock song in the collective vocals of young people that count to a hundred in an empty grain tray. Hear a pop melody in the hoarse sounds of wildlife as he and his team cross the forests of Brown County in search of Sasquatch. Hear a hip-hop beat in the police sirens on Washington Street in downtown Indianapolis. And as you sit in your spacious Ripple home, you can almost dance a duet between the squirrel scratching your window and the blows of a structure team running next door.
Although the latter would possibly be a sign that Hyatt, despite everything, is succumbing to COVID-era hut fever.
Like many others in 2020, Stuart Hyatt feels a little crazy. Quarantined at home, he tries to paint paintings of his workplace in the garage while housing a wife and two young men who are also trapped at home with their paintings and studios. However, unlike most other people, the musician and artist is also looking to announce a new album. “It’s a strange environment in which to publish artistic paintings,” he says through Zoom, sitting on the panel of his garage, with reddish brown hair on a strand. “I feel like the ultimate culprit for asking others to pay attention to it.”
Asking others to be careful is something Hyatt hasn’t done much in his career. He is the first to admit that recording the sounds of squirrels and police sirens is far from commercially viable. You are not a traveling musician who can earn cash by selling tickets or merchandise. He insists on making every task urgent on vinyl and wrapping it in an elaborate package, even accompanied by a bound e-book or a richly illustrated comic strip, cutting the margins of any record sale. Hyatt is also notoriously beneficial in sharing the budget among its extensive list of contributors. And his paintings are almost entirely financed in the first place through grants or commissions of museums and public tourist boards, at least from a monetary point of view, regardless of whether someone hears the finished product or not.
Still, people’s ears seem to be recovering lately. The National Geographic Society funded its most recent project, which earned extensive and brilliant reviews in the New York Times. Pieces by Gizmodo and The Independent followed. Interestingly, the album Hyatt receives this attention for is his modest maxim to date. In fact, it is based on such a superior sound in frequency that the human ear hears it: the echolocation calls of the Indiana bat.
Released in May, Ultrasonic is the eighth album in Hyatt’s Field Works series. He spent the summer afternoons of 2019 with a small check-in team in the woods around Indianapolis International Airport. They installed microphones on trees and flagpoles and hung them from poles. As the sun went down and the night creatures began to move, Hyatt pressed the record. It is possible that the team simply did not hear anything at that time, however, they monitored their device for signals that the ally animals were vocalizing. The next morning, when Hyatt processed the recordings, he discovered hours of squeaking, hissing and shooting through bats that would shape the back of his record. “Ninety-nine percent of the population has never heard that sound,” he says. “To tell this story is to seek to open a portal in some other dimension.”
Ultrasound is a new domain for Hyatt: activism. Although his music has overlooked other people and places, with those recordings, Hyatt expects listeners to do more than just take note. You need them to act. The Indiana bat is an endangered species, with just over 500,000 in the Midwest, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and South. The small creatures were decimated through a fungal infection called white snout syndrome. And the developers have paved many swamps and forests that it uses as a habitat.
Ultrasound checks to give a voice to an endangered bat. But in the process, the paintings can eventually become their composer despite everything you’ve heard.
The national road through the field works
Glen Rose training through fieldwork