Sign 4
(to the right of the songbirds)
Track 5:
In Praise of the Red-Winged Blackbird
The Red-Winged Blackbird has always been one of my favorite birds. The little splash of red and white on jet black is very striking, and their behavior is pretty congruent with the boldness of their color. I also learned from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's helpful site AllAboutBirds.org, that males have somewhere between 5-15 female mates, each with her own nest, that he will protect within his territory. My favorite thing about the male Red-Winged Blackbird, though, is how he “sings” to attract mates. His has always felt like the most humorously abrasive song to me, and I always thought of it more like a scream than a song. That being said, there is a ton of tonal variety within that song, and I did not discover it until I slowed it down.
In this piece, every sound you hear comes from recordings of Red-Winged Blackbird songs and calls. The only exception to this is the part of the piece where I am singing, which is my voice, but run through a Vocoder. This Vocoder was made using one sample of Red-Winged Blackbird song While some of the components of this piece come from heavily distorted excerpts from this recording, some of them are simply the original audio but slowed down or reversed.
Track 6:
Eerie Songscape
A soundscape made entirely from ghostly slowed-down songbird recordings
Track 7:
Cardinalae Porch Dialogue
In this slowing process, two of the species whose songs resonated the most with me were that of the Cardinal and the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, both part of the Cardinalae family. While we don’t have any Cardinals or Rose-breasted Grosbeaks is this case, we do have tanagers, buntings, and grosbeaks who are all part of the Cardinalae family.
Listening to the slowed-down song of the Rose-breasted Grosbeak reminded me of two old friends sitting and having a rambling conversation filled with grumblings and whinings about the same old things. I imagined this chat happening on a porch in the summertime or early fall. I decided to manifest this imagined scene: two old friends sitting on a porch, children (slowed-down recordings of cardinals, among other birds) occasionally running outside, playing in the yard and causing a commotion, birds, and a peaceful shift in weather as the evening rolls on.
