Nightjar’s nest
Installation for Festival International Musique Actuelle Victoriaville, Quebec, May 13-19, 2024. Restaged for Microfestival Grenache, Saint-Damien, Quebec, August 24, 2024.
Twenty-four speaker nests, assembled from small wooden filing drawers, wireless speakers, and dried mulch. These arranged around a public agora in two concentric circles, at positions corresponding to the hour marks on a clock face.
Each speaker produces a single-frequency tone, such that the interference between the inside and outside speaker at each clock position beats in a manner reminiscent of the call of the Lesser Nighthawk, a nocturnal bird common to the deserts near my home in California. As the climate of the southwest has warmed and dried, its territory ranges farther north and east with each passing season, where it will eventually cross that of its Eastern forest-dwelling neighbors.
The fundamental frequency of these tones, the speed of the beating between pairs of tones, and the frequency of their occurrence are determined by archival data since 1950 from several weather stations near Victoriaville. The intensity of sound increases from single entrances in the first quarter of each hour to a maelstrom of fluttering in the last, as we hear the proportional acceleration of heat, precipitation, and fire in Quebec and Canada over the last seventy years.
As we listen, we become aware that our seemingly static surroundings are changing, implacably, at scale and speed too slow and large to be grasped by an individual at an instant, and that placid and contemplative sound on first encounter has later become siren.
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