Composer, trombonist and sound artist Robert Jarvis is rubbing his eyes wearily. I’ve just dropped yet more homemade coffee cake crumbs on his spotless desk and asked, again, how the Batphone, a walky talk like device, works. “Bat Box”, he says with the weary intensity of someone who often ends up having to repeat themselves, “Bats communicate through ultrasonic sound. A higher pitch than we can hear. The Bat Boxes are detectors which translate the ultrasonic calls of the bats into our frequency range.” Ah, so each bat is like a radio station and you are tuning in? Deep sigh, “Yes, but they’re not playing anything you want to hear, at least not for very long.” He’s right. So far we’ve listened to a Leisler (bubbly), a Serotine (funky) and a Daubenton (like a machine gun), all interesting but not exactly “musical”, “ So my plan is to turn them into something worth hearing.”

Jarvis is one of six artists shortlisted for this Monday’s £50,000 New Music Award, a sort of Turner Prize for music. Funded by the UK’s largest independent funder for new music, the PRS foundation, the inaugural prize was won by former Pogue Jem Finer, for Score For A Hole in the Ground, a 20ft brass horn that is currently broadcasting sounds from a hole deep in a Kentish wood.

We are in Jarvis’s studio discussing his bid for the year’s prize, Echolocution, a “bat choir”. His studio is a small, neat room, with swirly lilac Anglypta wall paper, in his Faversham house. There is a pair of spotty socks on a side table, an Aaron Copland CD, two lap tops and not much else. A postcard on display bears the slogan ‘Nature Is A Workshop’. A combination of eccentricity and fastidiousness, it reflects Jarvis rather well.

In the past Jarvis has used flowers (their DNA), postmen (their whistling) and toffee sellers in China (the sound of their hammers breaking up the sweet) in his sound compositions. Echolocation would see bat boxes being placed at various locations around the London Wetland Centre. The ultrasonic calls of the 10,000 or so bats would be detected by the boxes, converted into audible frequencies which in turn will be digitally sequenced into music. If he wins, this summer for the whole of the bat season visitors will be able to go to the Wetland centre and hear the previous night activity represented in musical form.

So, the obvious question, why and why bats? “Well obviously bats communicate outside our hearing range, and I like making the hidden audible. All my work is about place and helping people discover their surroundings in unexpected ways. Sound is good way of doing that.”

Jarvis is up against five other projects for the prize. These range from Pedal Tones, keyboard player and composer Django Bates’s year-long tour of the UK on a bicycle adapted with music boxes, to Adjustments an operatta by Zimbabwe born, London-based singer Netsayi Chigwendere.

So, just how does one choose between a bat and a bicycle? Marcus Davey is the Chief Executive of the Roundhouse in Camden and a judge on the panel who has the unenviable taks of deciding the winner. “Judging the shortlist is the hardest task in the world,” he says. “It’s like judging sugar with broad beans.” So, how are they whittling it down? “Well, we’re looking for imagination and innovation, something to take music to the next level. To get people arguing.”

Davey has been involved in the prize since its launch in 2005. The motive for the awards was to increase awareness and understanding of contemporary music. “We wanted something that was a major statement about new music.”

It was inspired initially by the Turner Prize, but unlike its more famous counterpart, it was key for the PRS foundation that it was an award, not a prize, “The key factor in this prize is that there has to be a live element in real time,” he explains. “People need to be able to experience it. It can’t just be conceptual.”

The Turner Prize has thrived in the past on notoriety, so will that be informing their choice? “Well, we are definitely interested in debate. And I think notoriety is unavoidable whenever you are involved in promoting something ‘new’. People might say it’s the Emporor’s New Clothes but so what? There was rioting when Stravinsky debuted his Rite of Spring. There were complaints that Beethoven’s late string quartets were impossible to listen to. They were up in arms when John Cage debuted his silent work, 4'33". Even the 9 minutes instrumental segment in Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was scoffed at. But all those works have endured and inspired new generations.”

But £50,000 for a modified bycicle and by an organisation, the PRS, that derives the majority of its funds from royalty collection from artists such as Leona Lewis? “Well, it’s not a huge amount of money considering an opera or a musical will cost upwards of £5 million. And it’s a very small amount of the total £1.1 million PRS fund. It’s important to make clear that this isn’t taking money from succesful commercial areas and putting it into an esoteric thing that no-one sees.”

Davey himself is a trained musician and recounts the story of how he fell in love with the transformative and emotional power of hearing music in unlikely and unusual context. As a student at Dartington college, he fondly recollects, “outside music making was wonderful. There was a Shaga Hazi student who would play to the full moon in the forest, if I was about late and came across him I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”

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