Birdsong is the original electronic music

I mean, have you heard that shit? Have you walked/rolled around where you live and listened? Been lucky enough to go to somewhere there aren’t many other people and do the same? What do you hear?

A cocophony of riotous noise, overlain and unceasing. Listen carefully for the birds.

The noises they make are just as structured as ours, span a wider set of timbres, loop, reverse, iterate. Bass, middle and treble. Slow and rhythmic, high-pitched and frantic.

Use a high-speed microphone and slow the recordings down. You’ll uncover endless layers of structure and pattern inperceptible to the sluggish rate of our ears. Such music is this! Such capacity for deliberate sound, for pattern!

What are the birds doing with it? Do they have raves? Do they gather in the crowns of the tallest of trees and perform as it swings in the wind, safe from our prying cameras and chainsaws.

We only hear their alarms or, if we are lucky, what they want to advertise to each other over a distance. What do they say when they are millimeters away? When we are vanished? When it is storming and the branches of their trees are croaking and there is no hope an intrusive microphone can pick up their utterances? When they soar above the vastness of the ocean, miles away from land or artificial platform?

Our vocal chords are not so developed, but that’s fair because birds cannot type or solder. We make our own music, but after many millenia we have converged on similar sounds, and it is a privilege to be able to join them at it.