Greg Nieuwsma and Antonello Perfetto - Birdbrain - full album скачать в хорошем качестве

Greg Nieuwsma and Antonello Perfetto - Birdbrain - full album

A pair of blackbirds nested on our balcony in early spring, and laid their eggs. My wife and I watched their progress, allocating the balcony as their territory but sometimes letting curiosity get the better of us and going out to have a look at their tiny eggs. For two weeks the couple on the balcony took turns, one warming the eggs while the other flew off to feed. For two weeks the couple inside watched. When four of the five birds hatched, again the new parents took turns, one keeping the chicks warm, while the other went off to feed itself and bring back food for the four hungry mouths. As the chicks grew, they grew noisy. Their beaks opened for food and opened again to call for more. Food in, noise out. I put a recording device on the balcony to capture the sounds. Their voices developed. Food in, songs out. After two weeks passed; all but one of the chicks had flown. It was perched on the edge, uncertain about taking the leap. The parents stood nearby, singing their encouragement. Finally the young bird jumped, gliding unsteadily down to a crash landing. The parents went to check- the chick was dazed but fine. The parents hovered by until their child decided he was ready to try his wings again. Then he flew off and was gone. Back on the balcony the nest was empty. Not just the chicks; the parents too had abandoned it. As a parent myself, I was a bit shocked by the speed of it all. The nest was abandoned within the course of a single day. It seemed like a loss. I empathized with the parents, but also wondered if that empathy was warranted. Clearly this was the norm for a blackbird. Would it be more appropriate to feel something else? Was my perception too centered on human experience? Would it be better to judge the experience on avian terms? To find answers, I started learning about birds. I started with time. Did four weeks mean the same thing for the blackbirds as it did for me? The work of Robert Dooling suggests not. He found that when recordings of birdsongs are slowed down, birds perceive intricate details that humans cannot. Birds have greater aural acuity resulting from better temporal resolution than us. One month for us might seem like years to blackbirds. By listening to time-stretched recordings of birdsongs, we can mimic this effect. The recordings don’t represent an accurate reflection of our perception of the world, but it tells us that ours is not the only way to perceive the world. Vinciane Despret suggests that we can learn a lot when we open ourselves to new “modes of attention” – when we start to pay attention to other beings, acknowledging that they are also attentive, and start paying attention to the things to which they are paying attention. These modes of attention can provide new perceptions, different levels of consciousness. Experiencing music is a venture into new mental territory. Territories are of paramount importance to birds as well, though for birds the territories we’re concerned with here are purely physical. Humans also have physical territories, but there are differences. Avian territories have no maps or treaties to set boundaries, no institutional mechanisms for resolving disputes. For birds, the social contract is perpetually WIP; it must be renegotiated on a daily basis. They’re improvising, just as the music here is improvised. Interesting things happen at the edge of birds’ territories – disputes play out in displays of feathers and calls. There are many musical styles that surface in the music here. As with avian territories, interesting things happen when they come up against each other. Abrupt changes of direction, moments of uncertainty where the music could take several different directions. And some instances when the music falls apart in a way resembling birds bickering, flapping their wings and posturing to establish boundaries. Despret suggests that the longer a bird inhabits a territory the more his song develops. A well-developed song signals to a potential mate that this bird is strong and well-established, becoming a feature of the territory itself. The music on this record looks to birds for compositional inspiration here too: musical territories get revisited, themes recur, each time developing in different directions. It is our hope that listeners will explore different modes of attention. Birds perceive time in a finer resolution than we do, but it is easy to extrapolate in the other direction to imagine a creature who has a coarser time resolution than humans, a being for which the passing of a year feels analogous to the passing of a human month, a month to a week, and a week to a day. Such a creature might observe us with the same wonder I felt when observing the blackbirds. The last field recording is thus time-compressed to capture how that being might have experienced the chirping of the baby birds on my balcony. https://gregnieuwsmaantonelloperfetto...