Very shortly after Chris and I committed to make a live sound show about birds, deep skepticism settled in. 80 minutes seemed like an impossibly long time for people to sit at home, in the dark, with a blindfold on, and listen to recordings of birds. We knew there were a lot of different birds in the world—over 11,000 species as it turns out—and each that one could be identified by its particular sound. So at least we had variety to work with. Still, how many recordings of different cheeps and tweets can one person take? As we’d soon discover, the problem wouldn’t be a lack of compelling recordings, stories, and ideas in the world of bird sounds, but a surplus.
We could have done a whole show just on birds and music. Birdsong motifs pop up all over classical music, from Wagner and Vivaldi to Beethoven and Prokofiev. There are countless pop songs about birds: ’Blackbird,’ ‘Three Little Birds,’ ‘Bird on a Wire,’ ‘When Doves Cry.’ The oldest folk song in Europe that we have a record of is called ‘Sumer Is Icumen In,’ or alternatively, ‘The Cuckoo Song.’ In the early 1700s in France, women were playing music for nightingales on a special ‘bird organ’ called a Serinette with the hope that the birds would mimic their melodies. In the 1960s, a woman in the US named Virginia Belmont released a whole album of birds singing along to music. Her father, Joe Belmont, was famous for accompanying a band with his bird whistling, which was a whole subgenre of vaudeville entertainment. I could go on and on.
Bird names alone are a sonic treasure. Many are derived from an approximation of the sound the bird makes. You probably know some of these onomatopoeic names: Chickadee, Whippoorwill, Bobwhite. The more you pay attention to this avian onomatopoeia, the more you notice it: crow, gull, cuckoo, quail, godwit, kittiwake, smew, crake, whimbrel. The sound and name connection doesn’t stop there. A whole host of birds in English are given names that describe their sound: Screech Owl, Bagobo Babbler, Baliem Whistler, Black Laughingthrush, Chattering Kingfisher. Then there are names that are just fun or absurd to say: Crested Oropendola, Fulvous Whistling Duck, Eurasian Wigeon, Hooded Merganser, Tufted Puffin, Roseate Spoonbill, Glossy Ibis, Oleaginous Hemispingus.
In these names is a story of the intimate sonic relationship between human and bird. With the onomatopoeic species you can hear people trying to imitate birds using what sounds and rhythms they had available—their particular phonemes and musical sensibilities. With the adjectives you get a sense of how incapable language is at truly conveying the vocalizations and songs of birds. Chattering, screeching, and whistling are meager approximations to the sounds of the kingfishers, owls, and ducks they describe. The wonder of nature impels humans to try and categorize, describe, and reproduce it, but we can only get so close in the endeavor.
Once you start paying attention, it’s hard to stop hearing birds. Everywhere there’s some avian sound: the flap of a pigeon, call of a chickadee, caw of a crow. This has been true for all of human existence. Perhaps more than any other creature on earth, birds are intertwined with the human sonic experience and our practice of listening. Thanks in part to the hobby of birding, there is now a wealth of knowledge about the appearance and sound of these creatures that define so much of our acoustic environments. This story of those who appreciate bird sounds and endeavored to record them became a central throughline in our live show.
Birding and sound recording go way back—back to the beginning of audio recording technology itself. In 1889, Ludwig Koch’s father gave him a relatively new invention, the Edison phonograph, which people could use to both playback and record sound on wax cylinders. Ludwig was eight years old, played the violin, and loved listening to birds. He took the phonograph up to the cage of a pet Sharma, one of his favorite species. Little did he know that he was making what is today the earliest surviving recording of a bird.
In 1910, Carl Reich released the first commercial recording of a bird, a captive nightingale. In the mid to late 1920s, people began recording birds in the wild. In Ithaca, New York, Peter Paul Kellogg and Doc Allen made some of the earliest recordings of birds in North America: a Song Sparrow and Rose-breasted Grosbeak. These were among the initial entries in Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, which now has over a million recordings of birds and other animals. Today people make thousands of recordings of birds every single day using their phones.
Bird recordings fall into two general categories: individual species recordings and environmental recordings. Individual species recordings are prized for clarity: a clear audio snapshot of a bird with little background sound. These recordings are valuable for classifying species, but also a range of other scientific and conservation purposes like tracking migration patterns or keeping species counts.
The individual species snapshots make up a bulk of avian recordings. That’s in part because of their scientific value, but also because of the collection tendency in the birding community. To make an audio recording can be an act of collecting, akin to taking a photograph. It is tangible proof that something, in this case a bird, has been observed. For some birders this collection aspect is the organizing principle of the activity. You have a list of birds and you tick off that list by creating this record of observance. Birders load up their records to places like the Lab of Ornithology or sites like Xeno-Canto. Some individuals have recorded hundreds or even thousands of birds. Peter Boesman alone has collected audio of over half the world’s species.
In these recordings are documentation not only of birds, but also of the subculture of people who gather their sounds. It is common for the recordist to narrate the species of the bird along with the details of its observance. At the end of many of these recordings you hear the recordist, often in hushed tones, identifying the species, the location, the time of day, maybe even the weather conditions. Sometimes these descriptions go on for a few minutes, and the excitement of the birder is palpable as they breakdown all the details of their recording. They’ve just added to their collection, and not only can you listen to the sound they have gathered, but also the act of collecting and the reaction of the collector.
The aim of an environmental recording is quite different from an individual recording and requires a different approach and sensibility. Rather than trying to document one animal, you are trying to convey the sense of an entire area. It’s about the place rather than the particular. While individual recordings are often mono and directed toward one point, environmental recordings are typically multichannel: the listener can hear a space three-dimensionally. For an individual recording, the most important aspect of the sound is its information, how clearly it conveys the call of a bird. There is lots of information in an environmental recording, but the emphasis is more on the feeling and larger sense of an area. At its best, an environmental recording can be transportive, even aesthetic.
I find the recording we played this week to be incredibly beautiful. I struggle a lot with the term “art,” especially in contemporary consumerist society. What is made and what we appreciate feels so shaped and deadened by the forces of commodification. But to me, great environmental bird recordings feel artistic. Perhaps it’s because there is no real market for this audio, or that it is more an act of curation than creation. Whenever I listen, I feel in touch with the person who made the recording. There’s a warmth in knowing that someone out there noticed this same sublime thing I am now experiencing and thought that another person would enjoy it. Then they went through the work of capturing the sublime thing so that it could be shared. Listening and encountering all that feels hopeful.
In a technical sense, the work of creating a piece like the one we played this week is mostly done before the record button is pushed. The art is knowing the environment and picking the perfect spot to put the microphones at just the right time. Very little is done in terms of post production. You either nail the recording or you don’t. When you listen, you are experiencing all the work the recordists has put into learning the technical aspects of recording, the particular environment, and the birds in it.
When I listen to an environmental recording, I like imagining the space and the person recording it. Then there is the musical interplay of all the birds—the spontaneous patterns and rhythms. Like instruments in a musical score, birds disappear and reappear. Others move through the sound field, like some wandering woodwind or brass player. I get a sense of wonder at the eons of evolution that brought all these birds together to this space, but also of the particularity of the moment. The spot might sound like this every morning, but we are listening to one specific instance, never to be repeated but in this recording.
One of the classic genres of environmental recording is the dawn chorus, which is the capture of a particular spot at the break of day when birds are often especially vocal. We chose an environmental recording this week of a dawn chorus in a North Dakota marsh. It was made by Wil Hershberger, an avid birder and sound recordist. In it you can hear over a dozen species of birds including an American Bittern, Great Horned Owl, Marsh Wren, Red-winged Blackbird, Virginia Rail, and Wilson's Snipe. Many of these species have particular sounds and calls that are astonishing on their own, let alone all together at the break of day one early morning in a North Dakota marsh.
Just lovely. thank you will, and to you and Chris for exposing us
to this Art.
Yes, Wil Hershberger is an inspirational natural sound recordist -- artist, technician, and scientist! This is a beautiful recording!