March 12,
2019
Hadley
Green
The song
of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a bird native to Hawaii, is a delicate, flute-like melody.
If you listen closely, you can hear a short succession of chirps gliding
playfully from lower to higher tones. The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was last seen on the
island of Kaua’i in 1987. Its call, now archived as a field recording, is no
longer heard in the wild. Yet this weekend, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō and 11 other
critically endangered or extinct creatures will be heard in
"Requiem," a sound installation at the Boston Nature Center in
Mattapan.
It
combines the noises of birds and frogs, whose sounds have been sourced from
field recordings at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and The Amphibian
Foundation in Atlanta. "Requiem," which has traveled from Maine to
Boston and back again, is a purely auditory experience.
Staged in
a large, empty room with four speakers, guests will hear the sounds of 10 birds
and two frogs continuously looping on an audio file. The recording begins with
one or two animals noises, and slowly builds to a mild cacophony of tweets,
chirps, whoops and wood-peckings. Throughout the piece, familiar noises fade
out, and new calls are introduced, overlapping and punctuating each other
without rhyme or reason.
“It’s
entirely unpredictable,” says Steve Norton, the Maine-based artist and musician
who created the installation. “Sometimes it gets very dense and then also falls
silent." Norton says these pauses in the audio can surprise listeners.
“There have been occasions where people have said, ‘Is it over?’ It’s theoretically
never over. It could run until the power goes out.”
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