Bird brained or tweet of the day?

An exhibit by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg in London from 31st October will use AI technology to replicate birdsong!

Ginsberg, more familiar with research in to deepfake videos and how to prevent their misuse has teamed up with sound designer Chris Timpson of Aurelia Soundworks to produce this exhibit at Somerset House’s Embankment Galleries.

The work starts with a traditional dawn chorus and slowly morphs in to one generated by machine.

For those of us lucky enough to have witnessed life beyond a city and more precisely where there is a dark sky at night, we hear the dawn chorus build, surprisingly, at dawn! I say surprisingly because birds are fooled in cities by the absence of dark. We can hear birdsong way in to the night from species which, at a similar time, would be completely silent in the countryside.

Additionally birds in cities have to compete with a very noisy environment. They have to pitch louder for longer to attract a mate, warn of danger and declare their territory, which of course makes them more exposed to predation (and a bad throat).

It has been discovered that birds near airports time their birdsong to start half an hour before the first aircraft flight of the day. So the dawn chorus as we used to know it could be a thing of the past and it’s in an effort to recreate this but by using AI algorithms that Ginsberg hopes to make people mindful of the way civilisation affects nature. After all, it could be that an AI dawn chorus will be the only thing to remind us of what life was like!

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