hornbill

Hornbill, an interactive sound installation by Cassia Streb and Thadeus Frazier-Reed, is a set of whimsical, singing bird sculptures scattered through a grove of trees. A machine learning assisted system transcribes sounds of visitors and performers into musical phrases building a library of songs which the birds sing. The synthetic voices of the birds are contrasted by an acoustic, ambient soundscape that provides a sonic nest for the sculptures in the urban park landscape.

Hornbill is being shown as part of Synchromy’s 5th Annual Urban Birds 2023 installation series in Pasadena, CA.

Spectrum News 1 featured the installation in Arts section:
'Urban Birds' project high­lights local birds and artists

Hornbill was resurrected from an earlier form and reworked using a new technological framework to allow for more flexibility and interaction. The system includes a modified version of the Magenta machine learning project Piano Scribe. This uses the transcription model Onsets and Frames trained on thousands of hours of piano music to attempt to convert what it hears into musical notation. When used with instruments other than piano, human voice, or speech the results can be unusual and unpredictable. The transcriptions become recognizable or novel musical variations of the sounds recorded by the system.

These transcriptions create a library of musical phrases the bird sculptures “sing”. Several different modes of the installation allow it to run autonomously or as more of an interactive performance system.