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Description
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Belfast Botanical Birds is a piece for live tin whistle and soundscape inspired by the birds singing in the spring in the Belfast Botanical Garden. I spent one afternoon in the garden with my camera, attempting to photograph the birds. As usual, I didn’t get many fine pictures, because birds are quite good at getting out of the way of the camera. However, I captured some beautiful bird calls on the video recorder, along with many other sounds that you might expect to hear in a city park, including the everyday sounds of people, dogs, traffic and background hiss.
The composition portrays three layers of reality: one is the city park, one is the photographer in the park and one is the dream reality of the birds’ world. When I’m photographing, there is a magic garden of the imagination. As with the camera viewfinder, the mind crops and filters to tune out the everyday sounds and focus on the birds, but the everyday sounds of the garden intrude from time to time. At the moment when I’m recording a beautiful bird call, cars honk, dogs bark or other people walk by, talking loudly. Filtering out the background noise produced some beautiful residue sounds which appear in the composition, but they are no longer recognizable as bird sounds. Then I analyzed and modeled some dream birds quite closely on the original bird calls. Although synthesizing the birds eliminated the background noise, in the end, it seemed appropriate to include some of the intrusions in the composition.
The tin whistle, which represents the photographer, is often used in traditional Irish music and has quite a bird-like timbre and playing style. The tin whistle imitates the synthesized birds in an attempt at a dialog with them. Time works differently in the different layers of reality. I may be in a hurry to do something else, but the birds are not. And yet, they fly so quickly my viewfinder often does not keep up with them. Can I get them into my sense of time? Or, perhaps, will they draw me into theirs? (2008)
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Notes
| Tin Whistle and Soundscape (5:22 minutes) |
