Songbird
"The anthropologist Paddy Ladd, has written of the Deaf community as 'people whose lives were not motivated by a sadness in not being able to hear birds singing' and it seemed to me that whilst people focus on the concept of hearing 'loss', their sonic environment - particularly natural soundscapes - are disappearing. 'Songbird' unwraps the structures of a natural sound source and presents them in a number of different ways."
Songbird is a sonic/acoustic work that began development during a LabCulture residency at ArtSway, Oct ’02. It was exhibited as an installation within the ‘Re:Thinking Time’ exhibition at Peterborough Digital Arts April-May ‘04. A Shockwave version of the piece as a work-in progress was exhibited on the PVA website from late May ’03. Curator Ele Carpenter interviewed me about this work for Disability Arts Online.
Songbird is a sonic/acoustic work that began development during a LabCulture residency at ArtSway, Oct ’02. It was exhibited as an installation within the ‘Re:Thinking Time’ exhibition at Peterborough Digital Arts April-May ‘04. A Shockwave version of the piece as a work-in progress was exhibited on the PVA website from late May ’03. Curator Ele Carpenter interviewed me about this work for Disability Arts Online.
Songbird is an investigation of the relationships between pitch and speed, and their relationship with vibration. Anthropogenic sound generation can engender loss for native fauna – both of habitat and of airspace unpolluted by human sound – and this is developed as a parallel to the convention that deafness constitutes loss. Six core sounds, each filtered by pitch and time, create a framework of thirty, performing continuously within a random interactive structure.
Songbird was originally built using Macromedia Director (later Adobe Director). As of 2017, Director is no longer commercially available, and as of 2019 Shockwave support (that enabled content built with Director to be viewed on the web) has been discontinued. Below is a video which mixes a cycle of the work between the gallery and screen-based experiences. Although the work loops, random elements built into the coding mean it never repeats itself exactly, so this recording is not a reproduction of the work. However, the original work always constituted a sound memory.
For deaf viewers: placing your hand on the computer speakers will give you some of the feel of this work As the code trigger moves over the screen, each blue square shows a sound triggered. Squares along the top of the screen are higher frequency sounds, those at the bottom are the lowest, so depending on your hearing range and the speakers you are using, individuals will experience different mixes of sound, vibration and silence.