Machine Auguries – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Listen

Best heard on headphones.

The approach

Machine Auguries is an expanding series of site-specific immersive sound and light installations. Each iteration uses the songs of bird species that are iconic to a location to create a replica of its unique dawn chorus, but is slowly taken over by artificial birds. The work reminds us of the impossibility of recreating nature and the urgent need to protect it. The challenge here was to interpret and represent the ambitions of the artist through the soundscape, in a way that felt familiar to local people, and accessible to diverse visitors without diluting the deeply important message of the artwork.

OUR APPROACH

We worked alongside the artist, local sound recordists, ornithologists and sound archives to collate thousands of recordings of bird species iconic to the locations to create datasets of their songs. These were used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) – two neural networks that work in a “call and response”. We condensed the approx 90mins of a dawn chorus down to 12mins, and while following a scientifically accurate sequence of species, approached the composition in an almost musical way.

THE RESULT

An immersive installation, a “forest” of 22 loudspeakers, which through sound and light creates an almost meditative experience that is both familiar and uncanny all at once.

Credits

Created by Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Machine Auguries: Umeå commissioned by Bildmuseet, Umeå University. With support from Kempestiftelserna, the Arctic Centre at Umeå University and WASP-HS

Machine Auguries: Toledo commissioned by Toledo Museum of Art and Superblue.

Machine Auguries: London commissioned by Somerset House and A/D/O. With additional support from Faculty.

With special thanks to the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for their support of this artwork.

Machine Learning: Dr Przemek Witaszczyk

Sound Design: Aurelia Studios

Technical Direction: Louis Mustill of Artists & Engineers