FLORIDA — Musician Stewart Copeland and Florida-based naturalist Martyn Stewart released "Wild Concerto," an album combining field recordings of animals with human-composed music. Owls hoot, frogs croak and hyenas laugh across the tracks, which Copeland set to music after reviewing 30,000 hours of field recordings at Abbey Road to select animals for feature tracks.

Copeland, best known as a drummer for the Police, chose instruments for the album based on the raw sounds of the animals. "They're not actual notes, but you put an instrument with them and those animals become Pavarotti," he said.

Martyn Stewart has focused on the sounds of the natural world for more than 60 years, spending decades crisscrossing the planet to make nearly 100,000 recordings of animals. As a child, he recorded sounds of the Eurasian blackbird near his home using a tape recorder. His archive includes the last known recording of the Panamanian golden frog, a species listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1976 and classified as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. His recordings also include sounds of the northern white rhinoceros, which is now extinct in the wild.

Martyn Stewart is living with cancer. His niece urged him to preserve his archive of nature recordings, leading to the collaboration with Copeland. The two said they hope the album will help preserve the sounds of nature and increase appreciation for wildlife facing extinction.

"If you show people the beauty of something and get them to fall in love with that, maybe we can tip something," Martyn Stewart said. He added: "If we keep stealing from nature then the inevitable is going to happen. We're going to lose a lot more."

Copeland shot to global stardom in the 1970s as a member of the Police, which disbanded in the 1980s. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola later hired him to score his films. He went on to arrange barking dogs, clacking billiard balls and pile drivers in rhythmic loops to create music he called "found sound," and later began writing classical music.

The hyena is Copeland's favorite animal, and one of the tracks on the album is titled "Hyena Party on the Skeleton Coast." He said the animals "have a very wide vocabulary. They make loving sounds. They make aggressive sounds."