The 5am Music Festival

Press play. It is five in the morning at Bukit Lawang and still pitch dark. While the rest of the world is hitting snooze, the Sumatran jungle is already throwing a main-stage rave. It starts with the opening acts, the birds, before the gibbons hijack the mic, their calls echoing all the way across the valley.

Forget noise. The rainforest is a live music festival that runs 365 days a year. Every single creature on the bill has its own set time, its own genre and its own spot on the stage.

Pure territorial flex. After a pitch-black night of seeing absolutely nothing, every bird wakes up needing to shout: “I’m still alive, and this is still my turf.”¹

But it’s not just a random shouting match. Scientists have a couple of ideas about what is really going on:¹

• The Hunger Games of sound. Not every bird makes it through the night. If one stays quiet at dawn, its neighbours may take that as a sign it’s gone, and move in on its patch. Singing first thing is proof of survival.
• The ultimate flex. After a long night without food, belting out your best tracks on an empty stomach shows off how fit you are. It’s the animal-kingdom version of posting an unedited gym selfie first thing in the morning.

The opening act: the big-eyed birds. They take the first slot simply because their big eyes catch the very first light, before anyone else can see it.¹

The power couples: the gibbons. Every morning, a pair duets at full volume just to let the neighbours know exactly whose territory they are standing on.^2,3

Photo: Elaine Lim

The wall of synths: the cicadas. They don’t just chirp; they work like a wall of synthesisers, and every species keeps to its own strict set time. One in Malaysia sings only between seven and eight in the evening.^4,5 The biggest of them, the empress cicada, is described simply as deafening.⁶

The subwoofer: the siamang. Sumatra’s absolute unit of a gibbon. To drop the bass, it inflates a throat sac the size of a grapefruit and launches into a morning duet with its mate, loud enough to be heard two kilometres away.^7,8

The ultimate VIP: the orangutan. A big male drops a solo roar that can last up to four minutes and carry more than a kilometre.^9,10 But here is the real flex: his night set works like a pinned tweet. Scientists in Aceh found that the way he faces while roaring in the evening is the way he travels the next morning. He posts tomorrow’s tour route tonight.¹⁰

Photo: Ian Mun

The helicopter: the rhinoceros hornbill. You will hear this heavy hitter long before you spot it. Air rushes through its wing feathers as it flies, a deep chop that the bird radio programme BirdNote likens to a helicopter coming in.^11,12

The joke: the helmeted hornbill. This cousin of the rhinoceros hornbill delivers one of the trippiest sets in the jungle. Its call speeds up and up, and ends, in the words of the world’s hornbill experts at the IUCN, in what sounds like a man laughing.¹³

Photo: Idris Gimbal

The special effect: the frogs. Rain is their ultimate cue. When a storm hits, the frogs don’t run for cover; they treat the downpour like a beat drop. In one Malaysian study, the heavier it poured, the more they called.¹⁴

Legendary sound recordist Bernie Krause has spent more than fifty years capturing the wildest places on Earth. The loudest forest he ever measured was right here in Sumatra: 117 decibels, which he puts at “almost as loud as a thunderclap, if it were sustained, or a chainsaw”.¹⁵

So why doesn’t the jungle sound like a construction site? Because nature runs a flawless mixing desk. In a healthy forest, the animals don’t step on each other’s tracks. Krause’s idea is that each species claims its own pitch and its own time slot.¹⁵ When scientists tested it, timing turned out to matter most: the forest takes turns.¹⁶ It’s not noise. It’s an orchestra.

Photo: Ian Mun

At Sikundur, it was the frogs: one very long chorus that just kept going.

At Sikundur, the forest was logged from the 1970s, and has been left untouched since the late 1990s. When nature is given a chance, it bounces back! The orangutans came back. In 2013 an abandoned post was rebuilt into a research station, with 48 kilometres of trails through the regrowing forest, and a team there now follows twenty wild orangutans day after day, the first long study of wild orangutans anywhere on Leuser’s eastern edge.¹⁷ Elephants walk through the camp.

Did you know you can hear a forest healing? Recorders strapped to the trees at Sikundur take in every sound, day and night, more than any person could ever sit through. Every animal that comes back announces itself, and the recorders are there to hear it.¹⁸

Muting the rainforest: why one of the world’s loudest stages is going silent.

Birds are the first to pull the plug. When scientists recorded a forest in Borneo before, during and after logging, the birds went quiet within days. The insects kept buzzing, but the melody was just... gone.¹⁹

Some of these artists vanish because they are too talented. The straw-headed bulbul has a song so beautiful that trappers caught them for the cage-bird trade until they all but vanished from Sumatra.²⁰

Today, about a third of all the straw-headed bulbuls left on the planet are hiding out in Singapore, many of them on a small, rustic island called Pulau Ubin.²¹ Stand there on a quiet morning and you can still hear a song that has probably fallen silent across the Strait.

It feels completely broken. But don’t throw away your headphones just yet. Press play one more time. Against all odds, the show is still running, the forest is fighting to heal, and the remaining artists still take the stage every morning at 5am.

Play the dawn again

The audio at the top of this page isn’t a studio recording. It was captured live at Bukit Lawang, a quick flight from Singapore and a bumpy few hours up the road.