One of the most relaxing soundscapes I've ever experienced is gentle rain falling in the rainforest. After a long day of hiking in a hot and extremely humid primary rainforest, I'm back at basecamp drenched in sweat but incredibly happy to be here. The atmosphere has been tense all day and the insects have been deafening. The birds quickly stopped calling after the dawn chorus and it feels like something has been building up ever since.

When the rain finally arrives, it feels slightly anticlimactic. Instead of a full-on storm we see gentle drizzle which eventually turns into soft rain. The air is decidedly cooler though, and some insects have started to call again. I'm sitting on a wooden platform, fully immersed in the land- and soundscape.

I've taped my microphones to the sides of a tree, slightly closer to each other on one side of the trunk. They're about 20cm apart, roughly the distance between human ears. The grooves and notches in the tree trunk act very much like the features on a human face, gently focusing or reflecting certain sounds.

This microphone technique is sometimes called tree ears (I'm not sure who coined the term but I've been using it along with my friends Thomas Rex Beverly and Andy Martin). I like to think about it as listening to the environment from the perspective of a tree, like the trees have been hearing it for millions of years. I hope hearing this pristine rainforest will help you feel more connected with it, and with nature and our planet.

Recorded in the Congo basin rainforest with Sony PCM M10, Sound Devices Mixpre-D and DPA 4060 microphones.