Volker, I should point out that the audio clips on my website are the
actual field recordings of birds, not the audio from the installation
at the Baltic, which is produced by humans. There has been no
fiddling with time on the field recordings, nor any editing. The
tracks have been panned within the stereo field to reflect the
position of the mic in our recording space; levels were fairly even
across the tracks, except where an individual bird was very close to
a mic, then it was lowered.
I'm interested that Klas found the one he listened to stressful.
There are two factors that might contribute to this.
First consider how these recordings were made. An array of 14 mics
spaced out over an area of roughly 100m diameter, and placed in
positions where we expected birds to sing. In any one sequence only a
few birds were close over mics, others would be some distance off.
Normally one hears the spacial array of a whole group of singers from
a single perspective and the more distant singers will sound more
distant and have less high frequency content in the sound that
reaches the listener. In this recording it's like having 14 ears on
the end of long tentacles, so the multiplicity of individual sound
sources are less degraded. This could well contribute an overbearing
effect on listening to the recording.
But the second factor is simply down to the nature of the dawn
chorus. Personally I find the peak of a dawn chorus in a woodland
edge/scrub/suburban garden type habitat pretty cacophonous (in our
temperate region). Sure it's an impressive phenomenon, but not the
best time to appreciate the beauty of the birdsong - that comes
later, once the intensity of the first wave is over. Say after 5am.
This was one of the aspects we wanted to document accurately - how
all the individual parts contribute to the whole in a real world
chorus. One of the things we found was that there was more movement
than we expected during this first wave (when it's still difficult to
see) and birds seemed to sing from different spots than they would
later.
Our scientific adviser on the project was Peter MacGregor who had
also tried recording with a multi-mic array as part of a University
of Copenhagen study. They had 6 mics and were researching the use of
space by singing blackbirds. He said they found it impossible to work
during the dawn chorus since there was just too much going on and
soon switched to working with great tits (much simpler song) later in
the morning.
We're hoping to put together a discussion about all this on radio to
coincide with the Bristol airing of the show.
What we were agreed on is that the dawn chorus is a more complex
phenomenon than is generally given credit, particularly in such
densely populated habitats as woodland edge. There is intense
competition for acoustic space and it could well be that this is the
most stressful period of singing for the birds themselves. So maybe
Klas is close to the state of bird!
Finally, we ended up using the Brada session for the show, mainly
because we had 3 male blackbirds singing synchronously for a few
periods within our miced arena. Which was unusually close together.
So maybe that also is contributing to the overall competitive and
sonic tension. One thing for sure, it's a dense tangle of sound. From
my experience in selling CDs of my recordings (stereo), if someone
wants some relaxing birdsong to listen to, I tend to steer them away
from a literal *dawn* chorus.
It might make for a more listenable mix if I treated it more like a
symphony and picked one or two soloists and backed off the other
channels. In many ways I don't think this is an audio document that
bears easy listening, it's more something to investigate.
Hope this maybe clarifies a bit what the recordings represent, Geoff.
Geoff Sample
Wildsong Studios
Northumberland, UK
http://www.wildsong.co.uk
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