Olivier Messiaen talks about birdsong in this short clip (from some source I don’t know). Hearing his vocal imitation of the bird, a recording of the bird itself, and then his representation of it on the piano is really wonderful. It’s like a short media studies essay on the various types of sound reproduction.

To hear more examples (and see comparisons of spectrograms and sheet music), see here.

To read more about the work these birdsongs were used in, Oiseaux Exotiques, and to see a video of a performance conducted by Pierre Boulez, see here.

(video via immanent discursivity)