Scott Rogers
Xeno-Canto (Songs to the Sun)
2021/23
Around the time of sunrise is when many diurnal birds begin to sing. I’ve heard this called the “dawn chorus,” and to my knowledge it is a global phenomenon. The routines of avian lives might coincide with our own wakefulness, but birds mark daybreak with their voices rather than bells or clocks. In Europe this polyphony might be led by the Amsel / Blackbird or the Rotkehlchen / Robin. However, in Aotearoa it is the Korimako or the Tūī; in the Caribbean it could be the Gray Kingbird; in South Africa the Cape Robin-chat; in Kazakhstan an Azure Tit; or in Nepal the Red-vented Bulbul. For avifauna, “time to get up” is about marking territory, recognising kin, seeking a mate, tracking a predator, or sourcing food—it is anterior to notions of human economy. To me, the dawn chorus is the expression of living in the unfolding simultaneity of the world.
Xeno-Canto (Songs to the Sun) unfolded something like this: in Munich on November 27, 2021 at 7:38 am the sun came up as expected. This intertwined with the music program Between II: on Robert Ashley at Kunstverein München which had begun at 6 pm the evening before, and would run for 24 hours. During the event, 24 unique audio compositions were played at thirty-eight minutes past the hour, every hour. Each audio track was saved as an alarm ringtone for the iPhone, triggering automatically, whether anyone was present to hear them or not. Forming sonic interludes, these compositions were produced with recordings from the open-source archive xeno-canto.org, a database that holds nearly 750,000 field recordings of birds. I foraged through this site, choosing vocalisations indexed to locations where the day would be dawning, relative to the time in Munich. So for example, at 6:38 pm in Munich the recordings were from Yukon / Alaska, Midway Island, Fiji, and Norfolk Island. This process created a compression, bringing birds from north to south into colloquy with one another, marking the duration of the music series Between through nonhuman scales and rhythms.
In the spirit of open-source, an A4 publication listed all of the recordings used in the production of the work, and minimal changes were made to the original files. I considered these sounds as found objects, selected for the unique qualities of the birds, particular sonic artefacts on the track, and the evocation of climatic effects, landscape, or atmosphere. I intended the work as a gentle reminder—not only of the presence of other humans near and far, but also of the creatures that share our collective, yet relative, experiences of light, sound, and time.
(SR, March 2023)
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