Another sculpture from Kitty Clark (I’m really enjoying the sonic sculptures these days, it seems).

This one uses eight of those dippy bird toys to complete circuits at uncontrolled intervals, resulting in some happy aleatoric bird music.

[FYI, the birds tag on this blog is used surprisingly often.]

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)

I am feeling serious gear jealousy after this machine seen on dust breeding. Can’t wait for him to post some audio samples.

(via dust breeding)

update: thanks to the magic of queued Tumblr posts, he posted audio before this post even went live!

I still can’t believe these sounds are really made by that bird.

(via mediateletipos)

This is a great example of pulling musical content out of non-musical data.

(Although there are other ways to make music with birds and wire)

Birds playing the guitar. I love this.

(via Displaced Sounds)