Sep-30
Birdsong in contemporary music, using traditional instruments or computer
(excerpt from Atlantic Monthly online)
Birds, as Olivier Messiaen never tired of saying, were earth's first musicians, and to his ears the best. People have been mimicking birds in music since the dawn of time. Certainly the Western canon, from Rameau, Vivaldi, and Bach on to Wagner, Strauss, and Stravinsky, abounds with owls, nightingales, cuckoos, and larks, evoked in picturesque but simplistic approximations. Until Messiaen the challenge of catching the complexities of contour and timbre of any but the plainest birdsongs went unattempted.
For Messiaen the desire was there long before he had worked out the requisite technique. In his early prelude La Colombe (1929) he was already making the piano coo and gurgle, but still operating well within the sphere of impressionist precedent. In the years following, Messiaen -- music's Audubon -- devoted a scholar's zeal to transcribing whole choirs of birds, always in traditional notation, always in the field. Often his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod (whose performances of Messiaen's piano works, dedicated to her, remain unsurpassed), would tag along with a tape recorder, capturing backup material that proved invaluable later on. Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux (for piano), depicting birds of France, eventually grew to seven books plus the half-hour coda and summation La Fauvette des jardins (The Garden Warbler).
Sometimes Messiaen would present birds individually; sometimes he would place them among the fauna of their habitat, amid detailed sonic "scenery." Sometimes he went so far as to reflect biorhythms, stage-directing air traffic; sometimes he would juxtapose the songs of various birds without regard for where they came from, seduced by their vocalizations and perhaps also by the romance of their names (Australia's superb lyrebird or an elusive specimen, heard but unseen, whose mystique he preserved in the makeshift phrase "the bird of Persepolis").
Birds do not sing the way people write music, and transcribing them was like concocting algebra to reproduce calligraphy: it took creativity of no small order. Some two dozen relevant birdsongs taped in Europe and Israel, appended to Hans-Ola Ericsson's recording (on the BIS label) of Messiaen's last major organ cycle, Livre du Saint Sacrement, bring home the difficulty of the problem.
Birdsong moves faster than human fingers; the first thing to go when an instrumentalist mimics a bird is tempo. Also, Western melodies are strung together from notes, well-defined pitches neatly arrayed on scales. Birds sing microtones. They phrase in arabesques that swoop and glide. Their staccato "notes" are more like jagged shards than human musicians' points and beads of sound. The timbres and attacks are often energetic to the point of harshness, yet to our ears in the wild they may sound ineffably sweet. For the piano and for instruments of the orchestra Messiaen invented ways of clustering and combining notes to produce, often with uncanny verisimilitude, an impression of the real thing. Call it trompe-l'oreille.
At the same time, Messiaen took amazing liberties. He transposed certain songs deep into the registers of bassoon and bass clarinet, for instance. Real birds cannot make sounds that low. Boulez remembers joshing Messiaen about the incongruity: "No bird," he pointed out with Cartesian wit, "is gigantic enough." In the end Messiaen's birdsongs resemble his colors. "What he wrote," Boulez says, "was his imagination of birdsongs. If you analyze birdsong scientifically, you find none of the intervals Messiaen wrote. The starting point is in reality. The elaboration is very irreal."
(full article http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97mar/audubon/audubon.htm)
Jonathan Harvey
Bird Concerto with Pianosong (c.f. recent performance http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/perform/events/23april2003.html)
Indigo bunting, orchard
oriole, golden crowned sparrow - these are some of the 40 colourful
Californian birds whose songs and cries sparked the ignition of this
work as I started it in the brilliant light of California. 'Real'
birdsong was to be stretched seamlessly all the way to human
proportions - resulting in giant birds - so that a contact between
worlds is made. When I started to transpose them and slow them down
to our natural speeds of perception they began to reveal level after
level of ornamentation - baroque culicues and oriental arabesques.
They were put on a triggering keyboard and combined in dialogue with
instruments - particularly solo piano, who connects closely by
playing birdsong samples and piano simultaneously, and so
incorporated in the pitch and time of our own song-world. Birds
embody not only the joy of endless singing but also the freedom of
the body's flight. The orchestra, like the birds, would have to wing
its way through the bright air. Birds also use quasi-electronic
frequency modulation in their cries and songs. I took their hint and
copied their tricks in the electronic modulations of the orchestra.
If the songs and objects of the score can bring some inkling of how
it might feel to be a human in the mind of a bird, or vice-versa,
then I would be happy.
The Bird Concerto with Pianosong was
written in response to a request from Joanna MacGregor, who plays
both the piano and sampler/synthesiser keyboard, and commissioned by
Sinfonia 21, with whom I have a happy association, together with
GRAME/Ensemble Orchestrale Contemporain and the French
Ministere
de Culture. The birdsongs were encoded in digital form by Bill
Schottstaedt of CCRMA: my thanks to him, to Juan Pampin for help with
programming, to Sound Intermedia (Ian Dearden and David Shephard) for
their help with spatialisation, modulation and diffusion and to
Oliver Rivers for his encouragement.
- Jonathan Harvey
N.B.
The
synthesis was mostly combining birdsongs chordally in parallel and in
canon, and stretching and compressing in time. And cutting up and
recombining. Also straightforward sampler keyboard
transposition/speed change. Sometimes the SY77 would be added to the
keyboard-action, and sometimes these sounds would be ring-modulated
with bird samples and/or straight piano. The ensemble is
intermittently ring-modulated also, often only a sub-group of the
ensemble at a time. But the electronics on this recording are too
timidly recorded (typical radio) and a lot is lost.
listening assignment: [in a terminal window type]
sndplay /usr/ccrma/snd/cc/220a/pianosong1.wav
Birdsong recordings
Patricio's bank of bird calls lives in /usr/ccrma/snd/pdelac/Birds
you can copy these into your current directory with a command, e.g., like this one
cp /usr/ccrma/snd/pdelac/Birds/LaBuflightsong.wav .
example online archives for your own exploration (-- lots more out there to be found with search engines)
http://www.naturesongs.com/birds.html
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/G_Kunkel/homepage.htm
Synthesis by signal model (Fourier techniques), Bill Schottstaedt
setup: [once only, to make yourself a 220a file directory, in a terminal window type]
mkdir 220a
editor assignment: [to copy the bird synthesis to your directory and then run it, in a terminal window type]
cp /user/c/cc/220a/birds48k.scm ~/220a/
cd 220a
snd &
[then when Snd has launched, in its menu, choose View: Show Listener and in the Listener window type]
(load "birds48k.scm")
(make-birds)
[play, zoom, transform to sonogram, etc.]
etudes: save the birds as a file IN YOUR /USR/CCRMA/SND DIRECTORY ONLY (for disk space), then manipulate with possibilities shown in class, also those listed in Snd documentation, and with audacity
programming: edit your copy of the scheme code to create a new bird call
setup: [once only, to make yourself a 220a webfile directory, in a terminal window type]
mkdir Library/Web/220a
Synthesis by physical model, Tamara Smyth
Smyth, T., and J.O.Smith III. 2002. "The Sounds of the Avian Syrinx -- Are the Really Flute-like?", Proceedings of DAFX 2002, International Conference on Digital Audio Effects, Hamburg, Germany, September 2002. pdf / ps
Smyth, T., and J.O.Smith III. 2002. "The Syrinx: Nature's Hybrid Wind Instrument", CD-ROM Paper Collection, Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics 2002, Acoustical Society of America, Cancun, Mexico, December 2002. pdf / ps (award winner)
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~tamara/syrinxsounds/
Analysis and Morphing by resonances, David Jaffe
bird human from Impossible Animals
misc.
audio formats:
typical for 220a is .wav (also known in some software as RIFF), other possibles: .aiff (Mac), .au (Sun), .snd (NeXT)
typical is 16bit, 48kHz, others are: 44100kHz, 96kHz, 24bit
compression formats: Ogg Vorbis (encode / decode), mp3 (decode)
converting formats with sox: [type in a terminal, e.g., upsampling and adding channels from a mono, 22kHz file called oldsnd.wav]
sox oldsnd.wav -c2 -r48000 newsnd.wav
terminal-based help: [type in a terminal, for help on e.g., audacity, or info on Ogg Vorbis programs]
man audacity
apropos vorbis
checking audio, launching audacity, etc.: [type in a terminal]
envy24control &
audacity &
listing contents of course-related directories: [type in a terminal]
ls ~/220a
ls /usr/ccrma/snd/220a-2003/<your login>/
ls ~/Library/Web/220a