Sign 5
(to the left of the hummingbirds)
The source material for all of these hummingbird pieces is several recordings from within a swarm of Rufous Hummingbirds in Three Rivers, CA. After slowing down these recordings, I realized that there’s much more variation in them that we can perceive with the naked ear. This slowing down process felt almost like looking at the sound through a microscope, and I found these little magical nuggets that otherwise would’ve gone missed. Smaller creatures interact with the world at a different physical scale than we do, so it makes sense that creatures who move more quickly operate at a different sonic scale as well, where the variation and “phrasing” occurs on a level too quick for us to catch.
Track 8:
Rufous Calling
The main repeating motif for this piece is a tiny snippet of a hummingbird call, slowed down to 3.125% the speed of the original.
Track 9:
The Fastest Form of Flattery
In keeping with this theme of sonically zooming in and out, I decided to apply this to my own voice. After slowing down a clip of hummingbird audio to 4% the speed of the original, I realized that it would be physically possible to replicate most of these sounds with my own mouth. As a vocalist, I took on the challenge of imitating them. This piece begins with the original clip at 4% speed. Then this clip repeats, picking up gradually in speed until it reaches the original speed. This then fades into a multi-voice recording of my attempt at imitation at 25 times the speed of my real voice. This clip repeats, gradually slowing down until it reaches the original speed of my voice, which resembles the hummingbird clip at 4% speed. All of the calls I imitated using vocalizations, but the wingbeats I imitated using breath.
Bonus Tracks:
Raw Hummingbird Audio
Just because I love listening to the source material at its varying speeds, I have included the raw audio from this hummingbird recording session as bonus tracks, at varying speeds, to give context to the above pieces and to hopefully provide some amusement.