Performed at The Drawing Center in Soho
Program notes:
"One day I received by mail an electronic bird. It consisted of a silver ball with a power cord and made twittering sounds when plugged in. It was a gift from Doug Kahn, a young California composer whom I had never met. He said it was the first piece of “A Dream Aviary” or, in my case, “A Dream Alviary.” I kept it in my kitchen and would plug it in from time to time usually in the morning. It never failed to cheer me up when blue and I began thinking of ways to use it in a musical work.
A few months later I read an article in Scientific American about how certain night-flying birds, the indigo bunting in particular, travel long distances partly by monitoring the positions of stars in relation to the rotation of the earth. A near-perfect time sense enables them to comprehend and compensate for continually changing proportions, an ability I find particularly musical; and while this has no direct connection to the structure of this work, it did serve as a first impulse and remains as a ghost.
I had in my possession a Sennheiser binaural microphone system consisting of two miniature microphones which, inserted in the ears of a dummy or human head, realistically reproduce sounds as one hears them, as they deflect around the head and in the folds of the ears. I began experimenting with moving the sounds of the twittering bird between two loudspeakers by listening to it with the miniature microphones in my ears as I walked slowly through the space. As I turned from left to right, for example, the amplified twitters would move accordingly, creating slight time-delays and phase-shifts relative to the stationary bird. Sometimes feedback would occur between the microphones and the loudspeakers, the pitch and intensity of which I could control by small head movements. Under certain circumstances the acoustical mixture of the bird twitters and the feedback produced heterodyning, a phenomenon that created phantom twitters, including mirror images, above and below the originals. Due to the realistic properties of the binaural system, these phantoms would appear at various locations in space, often in and around a listener’s head.
A performance of Bird and Person Dyning is a live exploration of these phenomena. The title is meant as an accurate description of the activity."