#24
#25

glad to discover this thread!
I´ve been obsessed with bird sounds since I was a child. i remember applying for a “sound call” about nature sounds many years ago, trying to emulate a kind of synthetic bird ecosystem with the old nord modular (hello fm!) and was very fun, i think i keep that patch!
i´ve recorded tons of birds in the woods, but my obsession started when I began to collect old vinyl libraries about bird sounds from over the world. birds are possibly on my top5 list of sound-generator nature sources :bird:

here are some sonograms from our common birds in barcelona…i´m sure you know some of them :slight_smile:

ocellets
ocellets.jpg960×684 71 KB

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#26

I hadn’t come across sonograms for bird sounds before. It’s a great idea. My bird field guide has onomatapeia like “chirp-chuwee” which is not particularily useful.

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#27

Not strictly bird-related but the work of Bernie Krause is quite relevant.

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#28

my friend sally mcintyre (aka radio cegeste) is a brilliant sound artist / writer in dunedin NZ, working a lot with birdsong, historical recordings of extinct species, historical birdsong transcriptions, &c, as well as radio and low-tech media. might be interesting to some
http://radiocegeste.blogspot.com/
[https://soundcloud.com/radiocegeste]

And the birds seem to know what’s coming too. After a week working mainly at home in the near-silence of the hillside neighbourhood, every day has begun with a particular neighbourhood tūī, which is itself the exact colours of this landscape, chortling and sparking outside my window like a malfunctioning robot, before gurgling lower tones, sometimes completely inaudible - the bird is singing visibly, but i can’t hear anything - and despite all the historic notation of tūī songs here on the table in front of me, i can’t hear any of this experimentalism, in this supposed transcription of this bird’s “music”, only a historic human - and specific cultural (pakeha) - listening talking to itself, and leaving the bird out of things. it would be better to look at the sounds the bird is making as emergent properties of this place, too, and not abstract them in such ways, or relegate them to the airless space of a field recording on a harddrive, a dead museum of sound.

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#29

One of mine (it was a proof of concept for an Artists Residency I did,
recording bird song, analysing & writing music based on melodies)

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#30

ahhh, nz bellbird is the absolute best

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#31

Jean-Claude Risset - Sud. Not exclusively bird song but a pretty important part of the piece.

Michael Pestel is a performer and installation artist who has made a lot of work with and about birds. One of his ongoing projects is to improvise with birds in aviaries. He appears in this BBC doc about David Rothenberg at around 6:00 in this clip. Also the Marcus Coates piece at 1:45 in the same clip is worth checking out.

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#32

oh! i almost forgot a classic bird “composer” (no speech synthesis here!): martin denny

Denny came across the trademark of his recordings–animal noises in the background–quite by accident while performing at the Shell Bar. As Denny related with an interview in Re/Search magazine’s Incredibly Strange Music,

The Hawaiian Village was a beautiful open-air tropical setting. There was a pond with some very large bullfrogs right next to the bandstand. One night we were playing a certain song and I could hear the frogs going [deep voice] “Rivet! Rivet! Rivet!” When we stopped playing, the frogs stopped croaking. I thought, “Hmm–is that a coincidence?” So a little while later I said, “Let’s repeat that tune,” and sure enough the frogs started croaking again. And as a gag, some of the guys started spontaneously doing these bird calls. Afterwards we all had a good laugh: Hey, that was fun!" But the following day one of the guests came up and said, “Mr. Denny, you know that song you did with the birds and the frogs? Can you do that again?” I said, “What are you talking about?” – then it dawned on me he’d thought that was part of the arrangement.

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#35

I’d love to read some in depth analysis of bird song; in terms of how it might have evolved and how it might compare with how human music has evolved across the world, or just be discussed in the same terms. Are certain species using octaves for instance, and if so are they breaking them into defined intervals, is the interval important to the song or is the tuning more predominant, how close are the scales and/or tunings of different communities of the same species (apart from birds that obviously imitate), how far has bird song within species diverged geographically, in communities of a species which might be isolated for instance? (Caveat; I know very little about music theory so I might be using these terms in an wonky way). I was just talking about all this with my partners father this week, a keen birdwatcher who knows so many birds by their songs alone. Someone here might be able to point me towards a book? Interesting topic.

#36

Someone here might be able to point me towards a book? Interesting topic.

This is a very academic book, and the main topic it speaks of is a bit higher level than what you are describing, but it still fits the bill nicely:

https://www.amazon.com/Noise-Matters-Communication-Haven-Wiley/dp/0674744128/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1530310617&sr=8-1&keywords=noise+matters

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#37

that might be a task for machine learning.
but what do i know.

https://store.birds.cornell.edu/Raven_s/20.htm
http://www.birds.cornell.edu

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#38

Playing outside, or playing previous recordings outside and then recording the recording plus the accompaniment of the birds and/or cicadas is one of my favorite things to do. Maybe go back and tweak aspects of the original, take it back out again for another round…Ahh infinite fun!

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Disquiet Junto Project 0340: Porta Party
#39

I’ve had an interest in composing for songbirds, specifically crows (technically songbirds, although their songs are not very popular).

Digression: Linguists Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have stated that they see music as an accidental and frivolous byproduct of language evolution, “cotton candy for the mind.” Music is found in all cultures and it is a linear form of communication that is processed by the same parts of the brain as language. But I’ve always thought that this is backwards, that music came first and language piggybacked on top of this.

The difference between bird song and human music is syntax. Bird song can change over time and from place to place, but it’s not like music where the possibilities for ordering and combining elements is endless. It’s like the difference between animal cries (or human interjections like “hey!” and “ow” and tsk-tsk) and language. For reasons I never totally grokked, language is not believed to have evolved from animal cries, so for a bird to produce or appreciate music would not likely be an extension of birdsong.

So, crows… At least some species of crows are thought to be as intelligent as the (non-human) great apes. (Aside: I like that “great apes” is a synonym for Hominidae, which includes the genus Homo.) They are so successful at providing for themselves that they tend to have lots of free time to socialize, play, and make mischief. They’re also quite curious and can produce a wide range of sounds. It seems to me that of any animal, they might be the most ready to develop a taste for music. (Maybe various parrots and other corvids, too.)

Who knows what kind of music might interest crows, though. I’ve played the cracklebox for crows, but they did not find it very compelling.

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#40

My partner is sleeping in another room at the moment because a crow is waking her up every morning at 5am. I like the Ted talk about crows, it’s also a good warning not to piss them off, looks those guys can hold a grudge (careful with that cracklebox!). Thanks for the info re language, music, animal cries, and for the reminder to read some Chomsky outside of really depressing politics.

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#41

Looks very interesting, I’ll try and read a sample to see if the tone is something I could get into, “very academic” always fills me with a little fear. Probably because I’m coming from a fine art background where academic is often synonymous with bullshit.

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#42

For part of the year, mourning doves hang out at the plaza where I work, and I’d hear them when I take breaks in the afternoon. A few months ago I decided I’d write something imitating their calls.

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#43

I can hear the structure of their call in that! Very nicely done.

#44

and there’s more parts

and that man is a genius imo

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#45

sorry not sorry

hey…it reminds me of birds :exploding_head:

ornithology

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