Please, Please, Pleased to Meet'cha

Wave Hill, a 28-acre park/garden in the Bronx, commissions a public piece each year for their grounds. In summer 2006, I made a sound piece that was installed in six large trees throughout the property. The project stemmed from my interest in bird vocalizations (bird calls and songs), which are very difficult sounds to describe. I thought of this as a unique translation problem, one that stretches both our linguistic and visual descriptive systems.

I put out a call for participants to the translators and interpreters at the United Nations, asking for volunteers who would try to vocalize the sounds of birds, working solely from the various phonetic, graphic, and mnemonic systems for describing bird sounds that I had compiled. Many of the mnemonics came from birding guides “Please, Please, Please to Meet’cha” was the mnemonic for the Chestnut-sided Warbler, for example. In the 1950s, Ornithologist Aretas Saunders published a book in the 1903s with diagrams that were something between a drawing and a musical score to render the sounds visually, and I worked extensively with those as well.

I explicitly wanted to work with translators who knew nothing about birds, and I didn't let any of them hear the particular birds beforehand so that their performances would not be imitations but interpretive, generative acts—translations that were performed on the fly and recorded. Afterwards, I worked with these recordings to compose six layered soundtracks that drew from several voices each, and which in total represented six birds commonly heard at Wave Hill.

Six sound systems were installed into different trees at Wave Hill and each played a soundtrack one of the human-birds. On site, at the base of each tree, a visitor could see the written materials that the translators had worked from and compare interpretations.

Radio interview, Studio 360, September 7, 2006.