LONDON — Stewart Copeland collaborated with naturalist Martyn Stewart on a new album titled "Wild Concerto," which blends field recordings of animals with composed music. Portions of the album were produced at Abbey Road Studios in London, where wolf howls were piped into the musicians' headsets during sessions.

Copeland wrote the music and selected which creatures to feature from 30,000 hours of field recordings collected by Martyn Stewart. The album incorporates sounds from hyenas, owls, howler monkeys and the screaming piha, including species that are now extinct or endangered. One track pairs arctic wolf vocalizations with a trombone, and another is dedicated to hyenas.

Copeland said his favorite animal on the album was the hyena, drawn from a rare recording made on the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. "In fact, I'll share with you that my wife and I have adopted the hyena love sounds as a part of our relationship. Little kinky, but it works." Hyenas produce a range of vocalizations, including sounds described as loving and aggressive, and spotted hyenas produce a call commonly known as the laugh.

Copeland was the drummer for The Police, the rock band he formed in the 1970s with Andy Summers and Sting, which sold more than 75 million records before disbanding in 1986. He later scored "Rumble Fish" for director Francis Ford Coppola, and said Coppola believed film scoring is all about rhythm. He arranged barking dogs, clacking billiard balls and pile drivers into rhythmic loops to create found sound in his film work, and began writing classical music after composing for film. He had not read sheet music before becoming a composer.

"You know my daddy raised me to be a jazz musician. But meanwhile, just quietly, my mother was playing Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy," he said. "Now I've got like in one ear I got Jimi Hendrix. In the other ear I've got Igor Stravinsky. And so they've always both kind of been there interacting in my brain."

Martyn Stewart began recording nature at age 11 in Bluebell Woods near his home in central England and has continued for more than 60 years, starting with a Eurasian blackbird. His archive includes the last known recording of the golden Panamanian frog, a howler monkey whose vocalizations suggest aggression, and a crocodile that swallowed one of his microphones. The northern white rhino, among species he has documented, is extinct in the wild. From his home in Florida, he records natural sounds daily, comparing his microphone to a doctor's stethoscope.

"I always believe the reason I'm on this planet is to fight for the animals and the environment," Martyn Stewart said. "Audio is the barometer of the planet. If you wanna know the health of the stream or the river the dipper will tell you, the frog will tell you the health of the marsh and the birds will tell you the health of the planet."