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ENVIRONMENTS IN THE AIR

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Photos: Marco Lara

Environments in the Air was a soundscape and a cymatic piece presented at the Center for Digital Culture in Mexico City during 2018-2019 as part of the exhibition Espacios de Especies.  The second piece in these series of soundscapes was presented at the RE:SOUND 2019 MAH conference in Aalborg Denmark. Birds that inhabit cities needed to adapt their songs not only to the reverberations of the technosphere but also to the consequences of it —global warming and its effect on migration, avoidance of noisy areas, changes in reproductive success, and changes in vocal communication—. Both pieces work with the morning chorus of the birds that gathered in a specific tree in the forest adjacent to the exhibition center in Mexico City. They were mostly grackles, Quiscalus mexicanus. These birds were gathered in a colony and are one of the species that best withstand and adapt to urban conditions, group coexistence is a survival advantage. In the second soundscape, Technosphere02 I have included pitch variations, variations in call frequency, and song component redundancies. The non-audible component in this piece is the electricity of the surrounding area which I recorded using an electromagnetic microphone. 

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