Here is the full 6-minute Tweety Pie sound piece with video of the Tweety Pie sound sculpture out and about, singing out into the world all through 2019 and early 2020.
OR – view by Vimeo Link: Tweety Pie – singing out into the world – 2019
The sound piece is made from noises recorded around my home and then digitally altered to imitate bird calls, so that – layered up and repeated – they become a type of caricature dawn chorus.
Tweety Pie, the yellow sound sculpture, is made from an old gramophone funnel, a music stand, a bluetooth speaker, and a snuff box – containing a small plastic flamingo with motivational quote – and is operated using an mp3 player that connects to the bluetooth speaker.
I videoed Tweety Pie projecting the sound piece in many different locations, each with their own sound characteristics. You can hear these ambient sounds listening carefully or with headphones, but the Tweety Pie sound recording dominates the audio.
Here is the SoundCloud link to hear the sound-piece alone without video or other ambient sound:
batbleeps · Tweety Pie
I was delighted to have the Tweety Pie sound-piece included in Jez Riley-French’s fascinating sound art zine, Verdure Engraved, showcasing so many fantastic audio artists from all around the world, a great majority of them women:
Why Tweety Pie?
“
I wanted to crouch down in long grass under leaves, among the gorse, next to a marsh or in the peat below the heather – and listen to the sounds of the wild plants and creatures usually beneath our attention or darting above our eye line. To notice, and to try and hear.
I wanted to speak peacefully, listen deeply, as someone wise has said.
But I couldn’t leave the house. The house grows full of actions and interactions, the objects and matter hum, and creek. Listening to those instead, I heard imagined birds in chorus – fantastical birds, criss-crossing amplified and elaborated messages to each other, plucking the sound waves with their exuberant calls.
To sing out into the world, this chorus of everyday unseen actions needs a bold and intrepid bird, equipped to share the beautiful noise. My cheeky Tweeter will project the usually enclosed voices of the inanimate. Tweety Pie, gloriously yellow, is making a stand, singing the song of the furniture and the utensils into the wilderness, serenading the rocks and trees, the rails and aisles and waterways. Will it harmonise or will it jar, resist or be drowned out? Which world will pick up the tune? I send it out there – and wait to find out.
From the inarticulacy of contradictory feelings, and from all the fears, the doubt, the anger and frustrations – what sounds will emerge? You have to try your voice – and listen deeply.
This is the signal I want to transmit.
“
Sheffield – 2019
I need to thank these people for their help and time in facilitating access to some of the locations in this video:
Keith Rowland and Louise Saxon of Breedon Group’s Hope Works, in Hope Valley, Derbyshire; Michael Woodhouse of the British Model Flying Association in Norfolk; the managers and staff of Sainsbury’s Archer Road, Sheffield; the office manager at Abbeydale Golf Club, Sheffield.
... to Bonkers
Now we're talking, Lea Torp Nielsen!
Made North Gallery, Persistence Works, May 2016.
