ISOLATE SONG - Synthetic Birdsong Audio Installation | Max Krien

"Isolate Song" is an immersive audio installation celebrating the power of generational knowledge and ecological resilience. Over the course of the piece, synthetic birdsong generated using a custom Max/MSP instrument slowly evolves into the natural songs of indigenous North American birds.
Bird songs are passed from parent to chick through careful tutelage, markers of species biology and cultural belonging.
Their music, like ours, is tradition.
If the line is broken, the chick, separated from its protectors and its teachers, will invent a new song to fill the absent silence.
These calls are commonly known as “Isolate Songs”.
The inhabitants of this forest sing their own invented songs, born from digitally modelled songbird throats. They have been separated from their traditions, replaced by human design.
But traditions are invented anew.
As isolate songs are passed from parent to chick, each new generation will subtly alter what it is taught, as if pulled towards an innate genetic history.
Eventually, isolate songs become indistinguishable from the songs of the bird’s socialized ancestors, though the one has never known the other.
The bird may rejoin its brethren, and sing once more in chorus.
Based on the the work of O. Fehér et al. in "De Novo Establishment of Wild-Type Song Culture in the Zebra Finch." www.nature.com...