Chirping Arctic terns and howling wolves are among the birds and animals that will be heard in a pioneering composition that fuses sounds from nature with the playing of traditional instruments.

Birdsong and animal calls will interact with orchestral music on an album by Stewart Copeland, the former Police drummer and a seven-time Grammy-winning composer, who has drawn on field recordings made by the British naturalist Martyn Stewart.

Wild Concerto is a “collaboration between nature and music” where a croaking frog duets with a saxophone, a black-footed albatross twitters over a string motif and an Asian barred owlet hoots to a piano nocturne.

A guillemot, a hyena and a red deer will “perform” with Copeland on percussion alongside 30 musicians of the Kingdom Orchestra.

Copeland said none of the natural recordings had been manipulated or retuned. “All the bird and animal sounds are exactly as they were, but I put them in positions so that they add up to a melody and rhythm,” he said.

“Instead of sopranos and tenors, I’m working with hyenas, wolves and a chorus of birds. Their voices bring an unparalleled authenticity to the music.

“They all have their own individual, often atonal melodies but when you put a flute against a red-breasted nuthatch, for example, the synergy is amazing. I picked out sounds that I felt were the soloists, like the wolves, and others that were more atmospheric, like the wild winds of Antarctica, and treated them in a similar way to a trombone or a guitar … The wolves are howling with great soul, great passion, and accompanied by a trombone following their line. It’s jazz, the jazz wolf of the Arctic tundra.”

Wild Concerto is inspired by the remarkable migration of the Arctic tern from pole to pole, and some of the birds and animals possibly encountered along the way.

There is an environmental theme to the work, Stewart said. “Many of these species are endangered and their sounds could vanish in our lifetime. Through the Wild Concerto, their voices are immortalised.”

Over six decades, he has captured the sounds of the natural world, from lush rainforests to remote Arctic tundras – sounds that have been heard in natural history series such as Our Oceans and Blue Planet as well as about 150 films, including Cold Mountain and Frozen.

With an archive of almost 100,000 recordings from more than 60 countries, he has been described as the David Attenborough of sound.

Stewart said: “I was so sceptical about sticking natural sounds with music. So many saunas and salons play new age music with pianos and oceans and I thought that’s what it was going to sound like. But I was just gobsmacked. Stewart [Copeland] is a brilliant talent. He’s combined natural sounds and music seamlessly. This is another avenue for people to listen to nature. It’s giving the animals another voice.”

He hopes the album will raise awareness of creatures that are extinct, endangered or so affected by noise pollution that their sounds cannot be captured cleanly. “Two-thirds of the species in my library are now basically extinct. Twenty-five or 30 years ago, when I wanted to record one pristine hour of sound, it took about three or four hours to do that with minimal editing. Today, if I want to record an hour’s pristine sound, it takes about 2,000 hours to get that because there are so many manmade sounds in the environment … There’s about 10 endangered species on the album … poison dart frogs, wolves, Galápagos tortoise.”

For Copeland, the idea of using sounds from the animal kingdom was “immediately intriguing”. He recalled his first film score for Francis Ford Coppola, Rumble Fish, and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, where his sounds included dogs barking and billiard balls clacking.

In a video filmed at Abbey Road Studio, Copeland says: “As I’m composing these sounds, I’m very aware of Martyn out there on his hands and knees in the deepest jungles getting bitten by tsetse fly, black mamba, tarantula, because he has to go far away because of sound pollution … to get this incredible library of sound.”

Stewart donated his entire archive to the Listening Planet, a charity he co-founded with his niece Amanda Hill, which celebrates biodiversity, advocates for conservation, and “reminds the world why nature’s voice is worth listening to”.

• Wild Concerto is released by Platoon Records on 18 April. Copeland will join fellow composer Arash Safaian at Kings Place, London, on Earth Day, 22 April, to discuss the composition and the wider relationship between music and nature, before his nationwide tour.

• A track from the album, White Throated Sparrow (Is Happy On the Glacier), can be heard here.

• This article was amended on 14 February 2025 to correct the spelling of Arash Safaian’s surname, and to add information about the donation of Martyn Stewart’s archive to the Listening Planet charity.