Have you ever wondered what animals are saying? Using Australian wildlife field recordings, this techno-seance-style immersive audio experience offers speculative messages from creatures threatened with extinction.

Placing a small audience within a circle of shelves stacked with old valve radios, plus some other obsolete audio-visual technology, The Enormous Radio taps into techno-spiritualism – which has a surprisingly long history, from Thomas Edison’s “spirit phone” to today’s AI “deadbots”.

The Enormus Radio. Image © Sarah Walker

It’s co-created by director Roslyn Oades and sound artist Bob Scott (their COVID-delayed Nightline recently appeared at the Malthouse), in collaboration with technicians and designers including Matt Milne (lighting programmer) and Jenny Hector (production designer).

An inventive, superficially random but actually carefully crafted 40-minute soundscape emerges from the vintage radios, as well as unseen speakers beyond that enhance intensity, layering and dimensionality.

The radios, plus some old oscilloscopes and small monitors, have been hacked so they operate as a collective both aurally and visually: displays glow (revealing long lost radio stations like 3LO and 3XY) and some dials and indicators move.

Additional lighting including desk lamps are part of this synchronised design, which suggests a spirit-medium machine that’s conscious, perhaps alive.

After a brief prologue of actual radio snippets – cricket commentary, ABC Radio’s news fanfare, an announcer saying “critically endangered”– the machine seems to tune into “transmissions” from the animal world.

We sometimes hear their vocalisations in unadulterated form. However, these field recordings have also been fed into voice enhancing software, which then endeavoured to identify English words. Those “translations” appear as dot-matrix text on the monitors in synch with the slightly enhanced audio.

There are single words, short phrases and even a few brief, garbled sentences. Some of it feels haphazard, such as “opera”; some, like “f**k the world”, unsettlingly apropos given the human-driven destruction of animals and their environments.

Occasionally there are bits that amuse, including (if memory serves) “Tell me about your dog. Dog bad. Rat bag.”

The Enormous Radio: Kevan Atkins and Roslyn Oades. Photo © Sarah Walker

The Enormous Radio comprises five “transmissions” centred on specific species: Tasmanian Devils’ noisy collective eating, for example, or the combo of howling dingoes and night parrots’ morse-code like peeping.

Each transmission has a slightly different atmosphere, conjured with additional sound layers such as a sci-fi-like throbbing drone or crackly radio waves, and variations in lighting including near darkness.

During the transmission centred on blue whales’ calls (which is unlike calming meditation audio), the soundscape has an echoing, liquid quality, and each oscilloscope’s green dot squiggles into life.

The Enormous Radio sound design continuously but subtly evolves. It requires a commitment to thoughtful, intensive listening, otherwise it could quickly become boring. The text gently surprises and provokes at times, but with no narrative and the nagging awareness that these words are just arbitrary digital output (albeit edited by humans), audiences may tire of that too.

I confess my engagement flagged occasionally. The circular bench seat’s hard, backless discomfort got me thinking a comfy armchair would be more conducive to thoughtful, intensive listening.

We should feel uncomfortable about mass extinction though, and The Enormous Radio may inspire audiences to ponder it well after the transmission has ended. If we could understand what animals were saying, surely we would do more to prevent their suffering and demise.

The Enormous Radio is at The Substation, Melbourne, until 10 October.