I’ve been seeing an unusual amount of cool music-meets-science news of late, but this video presentation of Marcus Coates’ installation Dawn Chorus made the biggest splash in my birdbath by far. Seriously, the sounds alone left my mouth hanging open, but then check out the movements and the breath rate that’s visible in the clips of each subject. On fast forward, it’s as if these humans actually turn into super-sized birds.
(Click on the image to go to the full off-site video)
How did these people manage such amazing mimicry? Well, this being the 21st century and all, thankfully there’s YouTube video to sate demands for more info. And, small world, the demonstration subject is none other than our favorite birdsong man, David Rothenberg.
More about the work:
During rigorous fieldwork 14 microphones were placed around woodland to record birds during one morning of birdsong in Northumberland. From this multi-track recording each song was slowed down up to 16 times, then human participants were filmed mimicking this slowed down song. Finally the resulting video footage was then speeded up, returning the bird mimicry into its ‘real’ register. The films are presented on screens in the gallery relative to the position of the birds when they were recorded. (Full text here)