Interested in the uneasy intersection of nature and culture or narrative variability, the artist has incorporated into his scores what he calls field recordings, such as jungle noises from Jonestown, Guyana (in his 1995 monsoon), and the reverberations of tremors generated by the eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat (in eraser, 1998). In 1996, for the public art organization Creative Time, Aitken conceived an installation piece in the Anchorage, a cavernous space inside the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, that used recordings of the traffic noises overhead. In 2004, he completed a sound sculpture for the Barcelona Pavilion composed of a central post supporting a few sweeping steel branches that rotated while highly directional speakers at the end of each branch played snippets of scripted conversation. In October 2009, Aitken's Sonic Pavilion opened to the public. The pavilion is located in the forested hills of Brazil, at Inhotim. The Sonic Pavilion provides a communal space to listen to the sounds of the earth as they are recorded through highly sensitive microphones buried close to a mile deep into the ground and carried back into the pavilion through a number of speakers. The sound heard inside the pavilion is the amplified sound of the moving interior of the earth. Aitken has collaborated on his films with a wide variety of musicians, from hip hop artist André 3000 of Outkast, who was in Aitken's 2002 multiscreen Interiors to indie bands like Lichens and No Age, which contributed to his score for his 2008 film Migration and 2011's Black Mirror, respectively.