Narrative Based Sound Installation

Materials:wood, wire, lots of speakers, amplifier, monitor, custom sensors, custom agent and sound software in ObjectiveC / CoreAudio

Description.

Birds Singing In A Tree is a narrative based sound installation, a work that exists simultaneously within several forms of realities, including the physical and the virtual world, the artificial and the natural domains. It explores ideas of embodiment and presence, connects the physical with the virtual, the external with the internal, the mental and the psychological, in the form of artificial cognition and artificial intelligence. The aim is to blur notions of these separations into more grey distinctions. It is also examining current notions of control over nature and our ceaseless desire for its domination.
The narrative emerges from 30 artificial, software-built birds living out their moment to moment existence within their world, an overall soundscape emerges as a result of them being there. The soundscape is produced using generative sound technique creating artificial bird songs and calls. Birds are software agents, artificial beings, which have been coded using complex computer programming techniques. They are birds, as result of scientific and technological knowledge and progress, they are the "natural" under control of the technological. In the future nature will be a technologically reconstructed nature. The natural will loose any significance as being the natural and it will be constructed. A construction based on a view of what is a perfected nature, a nature to suit our cultural demands. It will be safe and under control.

laptop screen displays virtual representation of birds and tree

This work consists on a physical representation of a tree, a crude construction made of building-construction materials, which takes the form of a tree but is intentionally kept artificial and man-made. I wanted it to look like the model of a tree, but only maintaining a vague resemblance to a real tree. Technologies have being used to re-construct nature, this modernist notion is still prevalent. Progress is related to control, domination and exploitation of nature, so to be under the submission of cultural and market forces. Computer technologies are continually transforming visions of what is natural and post-modern ideas tend to think of nature as a part of culture. To explore this notion, the artificial tree is surrounded by real grass and flowers, which grow and die during the course of the exhibition, even though their placement is still artificial and part of the overall unnaturalness. Within the tree there is a network of small speakers giving out the bird songs.

Other elements in this piece are a computer and its monitor running complex software in which a virtual world mirrors, coexists with and extends the physical world. This virtual world consists on a 3D model of the tree and of the birds. Again this virtual world is intentionally artificial, it avoids visual realism. This virtual tree is a cartesian landscape as are the birds on it. A visualized datascape intended to point to a mindset, which produces a polarization of "truth" and "illusion". Birds, for example, are drawn as little cubes, or seen as just their flight paths when they fly around, constituting a real illusion.
Each bird is autonomous, modelled using custom made behavioural-simulation software and built using synthetic character design techniques and techniques borrowed from artificial intelligence. These birds have the form of a mind. Not a real-mind like ours, nor of real birds’, but one that has been constructed using techniques taken from computational-cognition, affective-cognition and artificial intelligence. As the sophistication of power increases, so will our knowledge of the brain, until the distinction between real minds and artificial minds will be a harder to make. The overall narrative and behaviour of the installation is governed by a complex software architecture of cooperating systems of perceptions, drives, emotions, behaviour and action systems that each bird is built with, these and also how birds do interact. Actions allow them to do the things they have decided, whatever they wish to do. Their overall behaviour is based on trying to maintain a homeostasis of their drives. Each bird only has a few drives, which include sleep when tired, eat when hungry, sing and fly around. It is through its drive levels and its current perception of its world that a bird will decide on its next course of action. For example, if it is flying around and sees some fruit fall to the ground and feels a bit hungry it could choose to land and eat. Or if its drive to sing is high, and it passes near to the tree it could choose to land and sing a song.

The narrative is simple. The birds fly around their virtual world, sing songs in the tree, land to ground in search of food (the virtual tree grows fruits which fall onto the ground) they can fall asleep and dream when they are tired. But it is through them following this behavioural narrative that the overall soundscape of bird songs and calls emerges. The overall composition is neither fixed nor random, it emerges as result of the bird’s "living-out" a moment to moment existence in relation to the world around them and to what the other birds are doing.
When a bird lands in the virtual tree, it will sing songs and make birdcalls. When this happens the virtual and physical worlds are connected, as the sound will be emitted from one of the 30 speakers that have been placed in the physical tree. The presence of each bird is divided between a visual representation within the virtual space, and the aural representation within the physical space. A bird is embodied neither as a totally virtual nor a totally physical entity but as a combination of the two.
Sonically the bird songs are generative, and a technique called Granular Synthesis is being used to generate the sound. This technique is constructing bird songs using tiny particles of sounds, which, when combined in certain arrangements, are able to produce quite realistic sounding bird songs. Again, I intend it not to be a carbon-copy of reality, rather, the intention is to maintain some sense of artificiality. Another result of using these generative sound techniques is that when more birds choose to land and sing, the overall sound slowly begins to loose coherence and recognition as bird songs, becoming much more experimental sounding, acousmatic. The overall sound looses its sense of where it is coming from and what it actually is. When all 30 birds are singing a cacophony of sound emerges.
There are several other elements here connecting the virtual and the physical, bringing both, the viewer and the environment into the work, so to enable engagement in the form of active participation. If a sudden loud sound happens in the surrounding environment, it will scare the birds away. They will quickly fly away from the tree or ground and circle around high up in the air, staying there until they believe the danger has passed. Further to this, birds can also be sung to, a viewer can whistle a tune to the birds, which will extract melodic and salient frequency patterns from this tune, and sing their own version of the tune back to the viewer, thus enabling the viewer to improvise a musical dialog with the birds. Just don't whistle too loud or you may scare them away. And, certainly don't go yelling at them, be nice to them.

Photos from exhibition at Royal Academy Of Art, Sept 2007