Beyond Melody: Sarah Angliss . Aine O’Dwyer

“[B]irds appear to listen most closely not to the melodies that catch our ears but rather to fine acoustic details in the chips and twangs of their songs that lie beyond the range of human perception.” – Adam Fishbein, Scientific American, How Birds Hear Birdsong (May 2022)

An evening of performance curated around avian biosemiotics, what birds listen out for, how humans perceive their communication strategies, and the poetry found in between meaning.

Sarah Angliss
A Wren in the Cathedral

Birds – and their imitation by humans – is the focus of Sarah’s set, drawing on her research into human-bird communication over time and the deep connections between birdsong and the sound recording age. Recorders, theremin and carillon bring wrens, blackbirds, crows and nightingales into the room. Centre stage is the Ealing Feeder, Sarah’s robotic carillon which she’ll be using to transport us to an Estonian dawn chorus. The chorus was transcribed automatically by bioacoustician Dan Stowell for species counting and identification purposes. Sarah’s own algorithms adapt it and replay it as a haze of metallic bell music.

Áine O’Dwyer
Singing in the Dark

A brand new work paying homage to the Nightjar’s nocturnal vocalisations. The piece will be performed in the dark and in surround sound.

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This event is a collaboration between:

Music and Other Living Creatures is a series at Cafe OTO (curated by OTO Projects) dedicated to music about, with, or by other living creatures. Birds, tigers, chickens, insects and many other living creatures are explored through sound-walks, listening sessions, commissioned performances, live responses and discussions.

EnCOUnTERs is a series of inter-disciplinary events that reside at the intersection between inter- and intra-species encounter and the sonic imagination. Events direct attention to curiosity, the speculative as well as the scientific, and to notions of multiplicity of being, experience and philosophy surveying creative and research-based practices that reference aspects of ecology, ethology and other creature-ologies, bioart and bioacoustics, sound/scape studies, zoömusicology, ethnobotany, critical plant studies, and related fields.

EnCOUnTERs is curated by Helen Frosi (SoundFjord).