Significant Birds

Significant Birds is a 12 channel sound installation created for ILLUSION, an exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin, in response to its theme of illusion as a means of accessing the activity of the human brain. The installation extends Parry’s research techniques into ‘exploratory form’, developed for his ‘Exploded Sound’ project, to create a unique aural illusion that interrogates perceptions of sound.

In contrast to the static musical soundworld of the former, Significant Birds focuses on rapidly fluctuating sinewaves which occasionally coalesce into recognisable speech. Each of the 12 speakers is hung in a birdcage around the exhibition space.

From each speaker a pure 'chirping' sound can be heard which is in fact a single sine wave extracted from a recording of speech. When all twelve speakers are active and in perfect time with one another the listener hears the speech reconstructed, although no speaker ever contains more than its one single 'partial'. Setting up a sound system of rapidly changing harmonics the installation tests how harmonics are gradually pulled apart in time and intelligibility is lost leaving a virtual 'aviary' of chirping sinewaves. Significant Birds uses real-time analysis of a sound file in Max/MSP allowing the use of a constantly changing (speech) input. The text on auditory perception is taken from Helmholtz’s ‘On the Sensations of Tone’.