In short
The Documentary Podcast: Episode Summary
Episode Title
Alexey Seliverstov: Bionic birdsong
Overview In this episode, Regan Morris dives into the innovative work of Los Angeles-based composer Alexey Seliverstov. The episode explores the intersection of natural sounds and human music, primarily focusing on how Alexey transforms birdsong into unique compositions. This includes a detailed account of his creative process from recording to installation at Harvard University.
Key Concepts and Discussions
- Birdsong as Music
- Alexey Seliverstov emphasizes the musicality of birdsong, perceiving it as a form of natural music that can be manipulated and combined with human-made sounds.
- He articulates how collective birdsong creates a symphonic experience, lacking a specific key, unlike traditional human compositions.
- Recording Techniques
- Parabolic Microphone: Alexey uses a specialized microphone that focuses on specific sounds, allowing for dynamic and varied recordings of the natural soundscape.
- He demonstrates how moving the microphone during recording leads to a rich tapestry of sound, reminiscent of a musical instrument.
- Creative Transformation
- The episode follows Alexey’s process of turning raw recording material into a sound installation for Harvard’s Shelemay Sound Lab.
- Alexey discusses the complexities of layering sounds and how different playback speeds can alter the perception of the original recordings.
- Interactive Sound Installation
- The installation is designed to be an immersive experience with around 40 speakers positioned throughout the chapel, encouraging audience interaction.
- Visitors can manipulate sound layers, creating a unique auditory landscape that invites personal exploration.
- Artificial Birds
- Alexey explains his concept of "artificial birds," which are synthesized sounds created from various materials, including his own and his brother's childhood voices transformed through technology.
- The idea is to reflect on the potential diversity of bird species on other planets and offers a playful take on the nature of sound.
- Visual Elements
- The installation includes visual components, such as VHS recordings of the environments where Alexey captured bird sounds, enhancing the sensory experience and connecting the audience to nature.
- The use of VHS is intentional, symbolizing the passage of time and the deterioration of natural landscapes.
Audience Impressions
- Audience members reflect on their experience, noting how the installation challenges conventional notions of music and encourages a deeper appreciation for nature.
- Comments highlight how the interactive nature of the installation transforms the audience's engagement with sound, creating a living, breathing space of musical exploration.
Conclusion Alexey Seliverstov's work blurs the lines between human-made and natural sounds, offering a new perspective on music rooted in the environment. The episode captures the intricacies of his creative process, the innovative use of technology in sound art, and the profound impact of nature on musical expression.
Production Credits
- Producer: Radek Boschetti
- Additional Reporting: Hanna Shinatri
- Presenter: Regan Morris
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This summary captures the essence of the episode while providing insights into the thematic explorations and artistic processes discussed by Alexey Seliverstov.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Regan Morris:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
0:30Alexey Seliverstov:and presented by Deloitte. Check out our new episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
0:36Regan Morris:There's a magical place where the desert meets the sea,
0:39Alexey Seliverstov:brimming with history and culture. There's no place on earth for art like this. With globally renowned museums. We're standing in front of one of the first sculptures of humans. And spellbinding ancient wonders. This watchtower was the highest building hundreds of years ago. Abu Dhabi Unwrapped is a sonic guide to a very special destination, Paid and presented by the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.
1:14Alexey Seliverstov:The sun is just rising and I'm listening to the most wonderful sounds I've heard in a long while. I've lived in Los Angeles for decades and I've come here to the Santa Monica Mountains many times to hike, to bike, to admire the wildflowers and the gorgeous green rolling hills, but this is the first time that I've come here specifically to listen to the dawn chorus.
1:44Alexey Seliverstov:I'm Regan Morris, and in this documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service, I'll be following the work of the LA-based composer Alexei Seliverstov. Alexei transforms birdsong into compositions that blur the boundaries between the sounds of nature and human music. Alexei, I can see, or rather hear, why you brought me here, but how did you find this place?
2:08Regan Morris:I found this place when I was looking for a spot without noises, because Los Angeles is very sound polluted. I came here last year for the first time and the place really surprised me because I felt like I'm listening to a symphony. There were no cars and planes and maybe this is the best spot near Los Angeles.
2:41Alexey Seliverstov:I guess the big question is why birds? You don't look like the, I don't know what a stereotypical bird watcher looks like, but you're young, you're tattooed, you're hip. You don't look like what I would think of as a bird watcher. You're a bird listener. Is that right?
2:59Regan Morris:Yeah, that's correct. I am a bird listener. I love the sound of birds. To me, it sounds like music. It's real music to me. and nowadays I prefer to listen to birds somewhere in the forest or in the field rather than the song. And it's really unique how our brain perceives these sounds. For example, when you hear 100 birds somewhere in the forest, it sounds really organic, really coherent, and it sounds like a symphony, but interestingly, it doesn't have a particular key, like a composition, like a song, like music that has been written by a human. I believe that this is really underestimated field of work in terms of music.
3:59Regan Morris:And I try to play with this world. I try to combine it with other instruments. I try to make that instrument sound as birds. And I feel that there are endless amount of ways to experiment with this. And it's pretty exciting.
4:22Alexey Seliverstov:And I'm interested in your recording gear. You've got this giant parabolic microphone. It's got a big dish of about 50 centimeters wide around it. And that's how you capture these sounds?
4:36Regan Morris:Yes, I use my parabolic microphone because you are able to record a particular part of the soundscape. You can focus on a particular bird or a creek. You can focus on any sounds you want to hear on your recording. And this is a really great tool to isolate particular sounds. And also, I love to move the parabolic microphone. while recording because doing this i have so dynamic recording at the end you can start from one bird and then change the focus to another bird and then you can move it out to the grass or to the sounds of distant coyotes for example or the water of the ocean And that's really dynamic and unusual.
5:40Regan Morris:And this is really inspiring because you can represent the soundscape in different ways. You can record it two times, three times or four times. And every time you will end up with a different result. And to me, it's like a music instrument. It's much more than just a recording tool. Could I try it?
6:06Alexey Seliverstov:I've never heard. Yeah, sure. Can I listen?
6:09Regan Morris:Yeah, sure.
6:11Alexey Seliverstov:A switch.
6:12Regan Morris:Yeah.
6:16Alexey Seliverstov:Oh, it's heavy. That's okay. Okay.
6:41huh
6:46Alexey Seliverstov:it's really different different sound oh i can hear it i can't see it yeah that's cool thank you thank you okay back to our own gear every week the documentary in the studio follows the individual steps of the creative process of today's most inventive artists. So next we're going to head back to Alexei's studio in Los Angeles. I'm intrigued to find out how he transforms this raw sound material, those birds we've just recorded, into a new composition, a sound installation for Harvard.
7:28Regan Morris:Well, now it's late at night, and I'm back in my studio in Los Angeles, and I'm pretty happy with how the bird recordings turned out today. I would love to start listening back to them right now, but honestly, that wouldn't be very productive. Before I do anything with the new recordings, I need to decide how exactly I'm going to use them in the Harvard Sound installation. Because you see, this installation is going to be pretty big. There will be something like 40 loudspeakers placed all over the chapel at Harvard Yard. and using that many sound layers means I really have to understand how they work together in one space.
8:18Regan Morris:And the next step I need to figure out is how many tracks I will use for the New Bird songs and how many tracks for my other existing recordings and that's gonna take me a while.
8:33Alexey Seliverstov:While Alexei's deciding, we thought we'd check in with John Pax, the director of the Chalamet Sound Lab at Harvard, who commissioned Alexei. What was it that attracted him to the work? It's the way that Alexei presents the birds. Composers in the kind of Western art music space traditionally have recorded birds and then maybe kind of hidden them in processing or presented them as some sort of material in a larger composition or perhaps recorded the birds just for study and then imitated them with kind of traditional musical notation. But Alexei really does put the birds front and center. He is really, he's more of a sound artist than a composer, I guess, if we're going to drill down into it.
9:18He really invites us to listen to the bird
9:22Alexey Seliverstov:and get lost in this kind of imaginary cacophony that he creates. And what is it that you're expecting from Alexei's sound installation? What I'm expecting him to create is a kind of a fluid, dynamic, sonic environment. Less of a kind of passive installation where things are just sounding and people walk in and walk out. We're kind of walking into this beautiful chapel space here in the Harvard Yard that Alexei's transforming into a kind of imaginary sonic rainforest. There are areas where people can walk in and control the sounds, interact with the sounds. There are different ways that people can listen to the sounds.
10:04Alexey Seliverstov:The sounds he's recorded are also going to be played back through different sound media type, which he does on his Instagram page. but we're really extending that into this performance space here. We have dozens of speakers. We have different types of speakers, different types of resonating objects. I think at least five different types of sound media, all deliberately chosen to kind of play back some of his field recordings and allowing the, I guess, the audience member or the person experiencing this situation to choose their own path through this rainforest. as if we were kind of out walking through the California hills with Alexei.
10:55Alexey Seliverstov:Over the last few weeks, John and Alexei have been discussing the exact layout of the sound installation at Harvard. Not just where all the speakers go, which machines will be playing the various recordings, how they will link up and interact, but also what role the audience will have. Every person coming to Harvard Yard will be invited to take an active role in the installation. And Alexei has started working on processing and treating the birds he recorded earlier. One of your favorite ways of treating audio is to use this 1970s recorder, the reel-to-reel tape recorder. What exactly do you do with it?
11:32Regan Morris:There are a bunch of my favorite techniques. Tape looping, sound layering, or maybe random tape splicing. but I really love the simplest one slowing down the original recording making it half speed or play it at quarter speed
11:52Alexey Seliverstov:Should we remind ourselves what the original bird sounds sounds like and then maybe listen to the half speed, quarter speed I'd love that
12:00Regan Morris:Yes, exactly, have a listen
12:12Alexey Seliverstov:Beautiful. Those are the sounds I heard with you. Yeah, exactly. Out in the Santa Monica Mountains. So should we hear it at half the speed?
12:19Regan Morris:Yeah.
12:27Alexey Seliverstov:It's so different. Almost like a different animal.
12:30Regan Morris:Yeah. It's a different universe somewhere underground. I don't know.
12:36Alexey Seliverstov:And should we try it at a quarter speed?
12:38Regan Morris:Yeah, exactly.
12:50Alexey Seliverstov:It really is quite a difference between the half and quarter speed. What do you focus on? How do you decide which speed to use?
13:00Regan Morris:It depends on which function it has in terms of installation. you can combine the original sound from one place with half-speed from the another and they won't have any conflict i mean regarding frequencies they will sound coherent and great because they play different roles you know one is original one is one octave down and maybe the third one two octave down and this is how my installation should work actually.
13:34Alexey Seliverstov:Couldn't you do that digitally though? Like can you give me an example of why the analog version is preferable?
13:42Regan Morris:Certainly digital world is such a powerful tool but the analog world and the digital world are different because when I make recording or perform live something with my reel-to-reel recorder I touch the tape, I touch the pinch roller, I can make some vibrations. It's almost like you play piano, I would say. And tape allows us to make a lot of recording without erasing, which is impossible to do with digital stuff.
Read the full transcript
14:17Alexey Seliverstov:It's more layered.
14:18Regan Morris:It's more layered. And interestingly, each layer you recorded before loses some sort of frequency. but it sounds great. And what I did for this example, I recorded some piano stuff and then I put another layer without erasing the wind. I recorded in the tea plantations in the Seychelles, this is East Africa. And what I did after, I started recording void, I mean total silence, and I did maybe 10 or 15 layers of silence.
15:20So beautiful.
15:24Alexey Seliverstov:So how many tracks of bird songs will you need for this upcoming installation at Harvard? I had a quick look at the plan in something like 16 simultaneous channels of audio. Is that right?
15:38Regan Morris:Yes, that's right. I will bring my entire catalog of field recordings and entire catalog of artificial bird songs I made. and all of the atmospheres will be played from vinyl. We will have 10 pieces of vinyl. Vinyl records. Vinyl records, yes. But people will change this vinyl during the installation because I will love to let them have such variety of options they can play with. And when you combine them, you always will end up with unexpected results. And this is how my installation will work. Because all the recordings will be played from different speakers. And they will fill out the space.
16:31Regan Morris:And what I really love about sound layering, it creates some sort of new reality maybe. It's some sort of new world that doesn't exist in our reality.
16:53Alexey Seliverstov:Most of Alexi's sound material comes from his own recordings, but there are a few exceptions. Chief among them are the birdsong recordings which Alexi was given by Pete Townsend, the legendary composer and guitarist of the rock band The Who. A few years ago, Pete found Alexi's music on Instagram, and they soon developed a fruitful artistic collaboration. I gifted him my entire catalogue of birdsong. I spent 10 years once recording birdsong. And what's interesting about that, in my library, we used stereo parabolic reflectors. So we could record birdsong at a distance in stereo, which is very tricky to do.
17:34Alexey Seliverstov:Anyway, so I gifted a lot of those sounds to him. But what he does for the benefit of listeners is he records birdsong. He gathers birdsong. he gathers natural sounds, the sounds of leaves, of streams, of anything that he feels will create a soundscape that has a meditative and spiritually uplifting mood and plays it back through dozens and dozens and dozens of small cassette machines or other small tape machines, often in a natural setting. So if it's tinkling streams, he'll set up a load of machines that are playing back the sounds of tinkling streams. If it's birdsong, he'll play back lots of birdsong.
18:20Alexey Seliverstov:So what you get is this exaggerated sense of the sounds of nature. And it's enchanting, I think, what he does. And so when I was working on a project where I wanted some soundscapes, a project I've been working on for a long time, I contacted him and we've been in contact ever since.
18:42Alexey Seliverstov:What happens when a mandate becomes a breakthrough? I'm Nishita Henry, special host of Resilient Edge, a business vitality podcast paid and presented by Deloitte. I sat down with two leaders who are redefining what enterprise transformation looks like. Jerry Hogeman from Deloitte and Sarah Oligood from AWS took me behind the scenes on how manufacturing, government, and global enterprises are evolving through major systems change.
19:10Regan Morris:What excites me is when we have these breakthrough moments that this stuff doesn't happen by accident. The triad of AWS, of Deloitte, of SAP, being able to understand the value proposition that people seek, being able to architect that, and then actually to define a roadmap to progressively achieve the goal really is what makes these successful.
19:29Alexey Seliverstov:Getting your humans to change the way they're interacting with their technology, the way that they're following the processes, or just that they're reinventing altogether and we're going to completely throw something out is very challenging. Here's what stood out. The 2027 SAP deadline isn't a compliance problem. It's a strategic reset, a chance to rethink how value is created. If your vision is across a 10-year horizon, your ROI is going to be different than if your vision is across a one or two-year horizon. So how do you move decades of systems and data without slowing the business down? And how do you simplify operations while preparing for what comes next?
20:07Alexey Seliverstov:From legacy systems to AI-ready infrastructure, the full conversation reveals how Deloitte, AWS, and SAP help organizations reduce risk and unlock continuous innovation. All of that and more on this special episode of Resilient Edge. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.
20:40Alexey Seliverstov:How are you? Nice to see you. Nice to see you. Do you have stuff?
20:46Regan Morris:Yes, I have.
20:47Alexey Seliverstov:Do you need help?
20:48Regan Morris:No, I have a lot.
20:49Alexey Seliverstov:No? Today, Alexei is going to show me how he makes some of the other sounds that will be played in the installation alongside the Santa Monica birds. When I was doing my research for this documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service, I heard Alexei talk of artificial birds, but I wasn't really clear what that meant. I was imagining bird-like mechanical objects that make sounds. Maybe something like a clockwork mechanism inside, a bit like fancy music boxes. But all I see here is a couple of computer screens and some old audio tapes, So tell me, what are these artificial birds?
21:28Regan Morris:These are birds that are made of different sounds. Modular synthesizers, rusty objects, piano sounds. I record somewhere all over the world. And I design tweets and then I program them.
21:48Alexey Seliverstov:So you're making birdsong, but it's none of its birds. The tweets of the birds are its human voice or its sounds, other sounds in nature?
21:58Regan Morris:It depends on the situation. Because, for example, I started creating these birds with a simple idea. We have a lot of millions, probably, Earth-like planets in our universe. All of these planets could potentially have their own birds. And these birds, of course, will be different because of the evolution of this planet, of this environment. And then I met Pete Townsend, and for him I made child birds.
22:32Alexey Seliverstov:Child birds.
22:33Regan Morris:Yeah, exactly.
22:35Alexey Seliverstov:Is it the voice of you and your brother?
22:37Regan Morris:Yeah, this is voices of my brother who was 12 and me. I was only 7. That idea came to me because for Pete's sound installation, I had to represent angels and that angels should sound as birds. I will give you some example how initially it sounded like.
23:08Alexey Seliverstov:So it's you and your little brother. Yeah. Sorry, you and your older brother. You're seven years old speaking Russian.
23:14Regan Morris:You speak in Russian, yeah. Nice.
23:16Alexey Seliverstov:And sweet little boy voices. And what did you turn it into?
23:37Alexey Seliverstov:Amazing. It does sound a bit like birds on another planet, perhaps. yeah that's funny one second these are you've got four uh old school cassette players here
23:54Regan Morris:interestingly this is a real bird this is a real bird and let me see what we have here this is a child bird it's a bit too loud maybe yeah because they have to be balanced between This is an artificial bird. That's another one. And this is the second childbirth. And this is how they sound.
24:25Alexey Seliverstov:These are all playing out of four old school cassette tapes set up on the table. And you just let anyone touch these? The people, if I come to the installation, I'll be able to come in.
24:37Regan Morris:Yes, you will be able to do it. Of course, you will be able to do whatever you want to. And along with these recorders, you will have like a pile of 50 different cassettes. And yeah, I will show you.
24:52Alexey Seliverstov:Don't people mess up your machines, though?
24:54Regan Morris:Yeah, you know, they have some color stickers to like, it means this is the bird song from one group.
25:03Alexey Seliverstov:And they're all labeled. So anyone can see this is the synthetic bird.
25:07Regan Morris:Yeah, anyone can choose and try. It's fully interactive, you know. You're able to build your own sound collage and play with this, and it's how it's built.
25:30Alexey Seliverstov:So I'm beginning to get an idea of what the key sonic elements of the installation will be. Bird songs, real and artificial, played from a number of different machines, such as old dictaphones, vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape machines. But there will also be a visual element to this installation, in the form of screens playing VHS videos of the places where Alexei recorded his bird songs. For those of you too young to remember VHS tapes, they were a popular format of analog video recorders in the last quarter of the 20th century. The videos for Alexei's installation were shot by the film director Tata Vizlovskaya.
26:11Alexey Seliverstov:Today's filmmakers can choose from a wide variety of formats. Most of them go digital. So I wondered what, for you, Tata, is the special appeal of VHS? I use a VHS camera because it is about time and how we feel time. I really value film as a medium, but only VHS for me has its distinctive grain and immediacy, and it feels very raw and unfiltered. So this disappearing format becomes both a document and a tribute for a vanishing nature. Also, the vanishing of VHS as something in use is similar to the problems of nature climate change. Right. We filmed in Malibu Creek State Park. And this is a place that really shows now the impact of climate change.
27:07Alexey Seliverstov:So we would try to use VHS camera because this format disappeared itself. After six months of intensive work, Alexei's sound installation at Harvard University's Holden Chapel is now open to the public. As you can hear, it's a complex web of sound layers that evolve over a number of hours. Some layers are carefully prepared and programmed by Alexei using his own software called the Tape Manipulator. Others introduce an element of chance or unpredictability. There is no way of knowing where the audience will point the microphones that Alexi has provided, or which tapes or vinyl records they decide to play.
27:50Alexey Seliverstov:And once they've had a chance to experience the soundscapes and contribute to them, how has it changed their idea of what is music?
27:59Regan Morris:My name is Victor. It's challenging this idea that music is just this thing that we just either play in our headphones and have this very isolated form of listening, or it's played in a concert hall. It's almost like this whole room is an alive thing and it's like calling out to things outside. This whole thing is like an organism. It's like understanding music as an organism and it's really interesting.
28:23Alexey Seliverstov:Hi, my name is Missy. It's nature, but it's like also this kind of surreal creature that he's built through sound and given its own meaning or purpose. Yeah, it's just like really playful. My name is Laura. I think my takeaway is that we all need music and we all need nature and we are so lucky to have it all around us and it maybe sometimes takes a moment like this to appreciate it in all of its forms. And Alexei?
28:51Regan Morris:This installation actually made me more confident that I go for the right direction and I show people how the sounds of nature work as music, how beautiful they are. And this is some sort of motivation to continue to go further.
29:12Alexey Seliverstov:Bionic Birdsong in the studio was produced by Radek Boschetti, with additional reporting by Hanna Shinatri. I'm Regan Morris. Thanks for listening.
From the publisher
How fixed is the borderline between human music and the sounds of nature? That is a question that guides the work of Los Angeles-based composer Alexey Seliverstov. In this programme, Regan Morris follows Alexey’s creative process from recording the dawn chorus in the Santa Monica mountains, through the ingenious transformations of the field recordings to the finished multi-channel and multi-sensory installation for the Shelemay Sound Lab at Harvard University. There is more to Alexey’s music than first meets the ear: some of the ‘birds’ are actually the sounds of his own and his brother’s voices recorded when they were children and altered beyond recognition by Alexey’s sophisticated processing. Adding ear-prints of empty spaces to the sounds of chirping synthesisers, similar to the effect of repeated exposures on an old-fashioned camera film, draw us further into Alexey’s imaginary landscapes. Are these soundscapes artificial or still mostly natural? How does mixing the sounds of nature and sounds that we associate with humans, such as pianos, alter our idea of what music can be?
