Making birdsong music | Amazing Australia | ABC Australia

PhD student Jean-Michel Maujean is recording the melodic calls of Australian songbirds and transforming them into classical compositions.

Jean-Michel spends days at a time camping in Western Australia’s remote forests, recording the tuneful chirps of species like the Golden Whistler and Noisy Scrub Bird.

He used specialist equipment like a parabolic dish to capture high quality recordings of distant birdsong, which is then fed into a 3D Spectrogram.

This computer software creates a visual representation of the birdsong, which Jean-Michel uses as a compositional and performance aid.

Later this year the finished compositions will be performed at a recital using instruments made by Jean-Michel, including 3D printed flutes and a ‘PV Cello’.

Jean-Michel says birdsong first originated in Australia, so the project is a celebration of a home-grown phenomenon.

“Some people think there’s no new music anymore, that all ideas have been used up, so I figure let’s look at the birds and see what they have to say about that because there’s plenty of new ideas that we can come up with,” he says.

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