- A generative audio-visual installation exploring how songbirds are endagered by climate change
With 10 audio channels, Naphtali utilized a “point-source” sound environment, each speaker treated as an individual sound-maker. Using granular synthesis, one grain is sent to each speaker. Even slight differences between the grains (pitch, speed, location) and aleatoric patterning of parameters create altered sound worlds. Slow moving or quickly changing, the undulating audio “pixels” illuminate and refract moments in time, eliciting reminiscent soundscapes morphing into electronic sound: fields of crickets, unruly flowing brooks, rain-rhythms, birdsong, and unruly percussion. With extreme changes and rhythmic/pulsing these parameters, the piece quickly dips into the domain of electronic music as a multitude of isolated sounds form new sonic entities, ranging from turbulence to stillness to Iannis Xenakis inspired hyper-electronics refractions. Never more that one or two audio sources are used simultaneously with a goal of maximizing what can happen with simple real-time manipulations to audio sources.

Four channels of video are aleatorically selected and combined, utilizing and inspired by opensource maps and data-visualizations and videos of bird flight-patterns, wind speeds, changes in migration and habitat due to climate change, as well as Naphtali’s photos, and videos of birds in flight. An Open GL “flyover” animation creates a generative/aleatoric flight from a “bird’s-eye-view”, the sky in various colors of day and night, most strikingly a deep orange sky, which Naphtali recently experienced in New York- a result of Canadian wildfires.

Sounds were sourced from public domain recordings of birdsongs and bird calls from the region of Nantes/Pays de la Loire, as well as Naphtali’s own sound collection of field recordings. Naphtali was especially interested in researching how songbirds are endangered by climate change. She used resources of local bird sanctuaries, visited a small, wooded area near Nantes belonging to her APO-33 hosts, and spent time walking/listening/recording and gathering sounds in local parks and the immediate vicinity of the installation (Machines de Îsle). Even the sound of the gallery at Platforme Intermédia itself was a source- a rather interesting elevator sound was incorporated, becoming a beautiful bird sound that sometimes serendipitously played together with the actual elevator in some serendipitous moments!)

The audio and video Max programs run on separate computers that are linked in the conception and design of generative and algorithmic methods, partnered so that viewer-listeners to experience bird sounds and images in both tactile and abstract ways. Both computer programs are self-regulating creating deliberate periods of silence or without images, a natural breathing between busy/intense sections and more sedate moments in the work. The work is aleatoric and so will never be the same twice.