Recording Bird Song.

I found myself recording bird song a lot. Bird song is such a communicative form sound with many connotations connect to them. It has such an emotive sound to it and even more so when it came to editing. I remember watching a Ted Talks with Meklit Hadero, she talk of an artist 'Peter Szöke's 1987 Hungarian recording "The Unknown Music of Birds,"' He slows down the pitch of birds to reveal a beautiful operatic performance which sounds almost human. This new perception of bird song shows just how we as human could be inspired by bird song when it comes to composition and vocals.

Meklit Hadero's story about origin of music...

'In Ethiopia, birds are considered an integral part of the origin of music itself. The story goes like this: 1,500 years ago, a young man was born in the Empire of Aksum, a major trading center of the ancient world. His name was Yared. When Yared was seven years old his father died, and his mother sent him to go live with an uncle, who was a priest of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, one of the oldest churches in the world. Now, this tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning, and Yared had to study and study and study and study, and one day he was studying under a tree, when three birds came to him. One by one, these birds became his teachers. They taught him music — scales, in fact. And Yared, eventually recognized as Saint Yared, used these scales to compose five volumes of chants and hymns for worship and celebration. And he used these scales to compose and to create an indigenous musical notation system. And these scales evolved into what is known as kiñit, the unique, pentatonic, five-note, modal system that is very much alive and thriving and still evolving in Ethiopia today. '