The project’s target is to improve the animals’ quality of life, by designing an interactive musical environment that takes the specific needs and skills of the animals into consideration. metamusic, developed by the artists' group alien productions in collaboration with the zoologists and animal keepers of the ARGE Papageienschutz centers its attention on grey parrots.
The video is a ramble through the various stages of metamusic, featuring our parrot musicians at:
also featuring the human guest musicians
The video was presented at mp 1968/2017. 50 x stolen goods and finds - anniversary exhibition Diese Wildnis hat Kultur 50 x steirischer herbst. GrazMuseum, 23. Sep 23 2017 - Jan 8 2018
metamusic aims to develop interactive sound installations and electronic instruments for animals held in captivity. The project's target is to improve the animals’ quality of life, by designing an interactive musical environment that takes the specific needs and skills of the animals into consideration. metamusic, developped by the artists' group alien productions in collaboration with the zoologists and animal keepers of the ARGE Papageienschutz , centers its attention on grey parrots.
Parrots are intelligent, individualistic and communicative. With them we have been developing and modifying mechanical and electronic instruments which can be played by the birds themselves. Fine tuned sensors provide interactive modulation of sounds. The musical patterns and sonic structures generated by the parrots nevertheless are not meant to sound aesthetically meaningful to human ears. The parrots themselves communicate with each other by means of their own “music” created by their personal instruments.
A major concern of the project is to avoid conditioning or training of the animals. The goal is to research whether or not the parrots will create meaningful “music” of their own accord —in order to find meanings and use in sound, which we have not discovered yet; and which maybe will change our understanding of animal intelligence—and music itself.
In ongoing collaboration of the Tangible Music Lab,University of Art and Design Linz and alien productions we aim to develop metamusic a step further: we will build electronic sound installations to be used by the animals themselves.
What are the instruments’ design aspects to support the physiological and cognitive abilities of grey parrots? Can grey parrots generate meaningful musical and artistic output with such instruments? Can they develop musical skills and adopt an artistic role in a performance setting? What are the common design aspects and differences in musical interface design for animals and humans? How can we support parrot individuality and expressivity in the musical interaction design?
Our zoological partners create the preconditions for our work, they take care of the parrots’ welfare and they are translators for animal behavior. But, unlike their science approach, our artistic interest aims at a creative exchange with this intelligent species. We make music together with parrots. We call it music even though it sounds “parrot-like”. We look at them as partners in a musical process.
The metamusic project AR 349-G24 is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK).
Homemetamusic is awarded the
CYNETART ARTE Creative Commission 2014.
The award consists in the commision for this video.
Andrea Sodomka, born in Vienna, studies at the Academy of Applied Arts, studies at the Academy of Music, Vienna (institute for electroacoustics). She works in the fields of intermedia, installation, electronic music, net.art, radio art, video and artistic photography
Martin Breindl, born in Vienna, Austria, is media artist, theoretician and curator. He studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (MA 2001) and at the University of Vienna. He works in the fields of media performance, installation, net.art, radio art, sound art, video art and visual arts, as an artist as well as a theoretician.
Norbert Math, he studied at the University of Music, Vienna (Electroacoustics). technical and artistic staff at the IEM, University of Music, Graz. Since 2007 assistant professor at the Nuova Academia di Belle Arti, Milan. Lives in Vienna.
Martin Kaltenbrunner is Professor at the Institute of Media Studies at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. His research concentrates on tangible user interfaces and the development of novel human computer interaction concepts within open tools for creative production. As co-founder of Reactable Systems he had been mainly working on the interaction design of the Reactable - an electronic musical instrument with a tangible user interface. He is author of the open source tangible interaction framework reacTIVision and the related TUIO protocol, which have been widely adopted for the realization of tangible tabletop applications.
Reinhard Gupfinger is a research team member and PhD student of the Institute of Media Studies at the University for Art and Design Linz. His work connects the fields of art, science and technology, whereby Animal Musical Instrument Research (AMIR) is his thematic research priority.
Daniel Gilfillan is Associate Professor of German Studies, and affiliate faculty in Film and Media Studies, Jewish Studies, and English at Arizona State University. His research focuses on 20th-century literature, sound and media studies in the German-speaking sphere. He is currently working on a book titled Sound in the Anthropocene: Sustainability and the Art of Sound, which explores the role of sound as a perceptive mode within sustainable systems, and how sound-based art, radio art, and cinema provide interventions into these systems. His first book, Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (2009) is available through the University of Minnesota Press.
Home9. Jan 2013
Quite recently, the artist group Alien Productions started an extremely fascinating project that will be presented at musikprotokoll 2013.
English summary
27. Feb 2013
In my second progress report about metamusic, we want to go behind the scenes and find out how it all started.
English summary
26. Sep 2013
22. Okt 2014
21. Mai 2017
Ö1 Zeit-Ton extended und Ö1 Radiokunst-Kunstradio präsentieren in ihrer gemeinsamen Ausgabe im Ö1 Kunstsonntag die verschiedenen Etappen des Kunst- und Forschungsprojektes metamusic von alien productions, sowie die neue Radiokunstarbeit „metavoices – Landschaft mit Graupapageien“ von Andrea Sodomka.
Mai 2015
Oktober 2015