Marcus and Esme

This piece explores how this technology might apply to birdsong in an ethical and imaginative way, moving beyond digital interfaces to a more embodied outcome. The result is a human scale ‘bird nest’ which audiences may crawl inside and listen to an A.I. model translate birdsong into musical human vocalisations which aim to evoke emotion without overly anthropomorphising bird language. 

In designing the audio we have worked with sound artist Nelson Standley-Barrow who has created an experience which maintains the natural sounds of birdsong with edited tones, rhythms, and tempos to create sounds which induce emotion in humans. The choice to not use any human words in the sound design is a deliberate critique of the companies which are doing this in their own work.

The A.I. model developed by Esme Sturgess-Durden is able to recognise a given species and identify the type of call it is making. For each species there are four segmented emotions, these include mating, baby birds, alarm and general contact. Each of these calls has a corresponding sound which humans can emphasise with.