by Jane Waite, Queen Mary University of London
What was the first technology for recording music: CDs? Records? 78s, The phonograph? No. Trained songbirds came before all of them.
Composer, musician, engineer and visiting fellow at Goldsmiths University, Sarah Angliss, usually has a robot on stage performing live with her. These robots are not slick high tech cyber-beings, but junk modelled automata. One, named Hugo, sports a spooky ventriloquist dolls head! Sarah builds and programs her robots, herself.
She is also a sound historian, and worked on a Radio 4 documentary, ‘The Bird Fancyer’s Delight‘, uncovering how birds have been used to provide music across the ages. During the 1700’s people trained songbirds to sing human invented tunes in their homes. You could buy special manuals showing how to train your pet bird. By playing young birds a tune over and over again, and in the absence of other birds to put them right, they would adopt that song as their own. Playing the recorder was one way to train them, but special instruments were also invented to do the job automatically.
With the invention of the phonograph, home songbird popularity plummeted but it didn’t completely die out. Blackbirds, thrushes, canaries, budgies, bullfinches and other songbirds have continued to be schooled to learn songs that they would never sing in the wild.
This article was first published on our archived CS4FN site, and a copy is also on page 9 of issue 21 of the CS4FN magazine “Computing Sounds Wild”. You can download a free PDF copy from the link below, along with all of our free material.
Related Magazine …
More from Sarah Angliss
- Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects, BBC Sounds (radio programme, 1hr)
- Echo in a Bottle, BBC Sounds (radio programme, 30 minutes)
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This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
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