Sound sources: bird songs. Since there are so many species around the world, I limited my selections to Canadian birds.

I have been wanting to work with bird songs for a long time. I have always heard them as the Earth’s sonic flowers, the first terrestrial melodies, but also as oscillators with complex modulations. After testing a few transformations, I felt like I had at my disposal the tools that would allow me to twist, transpose, and explode them into other materials in order to create new bird species. However, my first attempts turned out to be beginner’s luck, for bird songs are just like the human voice: they resist transformation tools, as if they were imbued with the species’ survival instinct.

Following a desire to retain an imprint of these disfigured melodies, I composed Birdscape on a quadraphonic system where spatialization was influenced by the imagined trajectories of birds in flight: the figure eights of swallows, the varied and choppy curves of bats, the stationary flight and ultra-fast movements of hummingbirds, the straight lines of birds of prey, the standstill of the cuckoo, multiform clusters…

All around an electronic nest… weather events, hunting, intimate games, daytime calm, nighttime threats, human danger, first flights, imitation, winter winds, high altitudes, languages to learn. Let me present to you the Winged-Biped Orchestra.

— Christian Bouchard [English translation: François Couture, iv-23]

Birdscape was realized in 2021-22 at the composer’s studio in Montréal and was premiered on October 12, 2022 at Usine C during the Akousma 18 festival presented by Réseaux des arts médiatiques. This work was realized with support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ). Thanks: Martin Bédard and Monique Jean.

Premiere

• October 12, 2022, Akousma 18: Soirée 2, Usine C, Montréal (Québec)