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Chatterbox

Chatterbox - from The Atlas of Feathers

A sound installation by David Worrall (2018).
(Audio not yet available).

In cultural terms, birds are embodied spirits with real voices of return and renewal, and as messengers from other worlds. As such, they serve to remind us, if we take the care to listen, that dynamically engaging in the phenomenal world is rich and encompassing. It is not to be taken for granted, as modern humans seem so want to do by externalizing responsibility for it to the universe, to a world from nowhere.

Chatterbox is a live-mixed aural cameo for social meet-and-greet and situations. It was composed it in January 2018 especially for the ANZACC Midwest 2018 Down Under Soirée and is dedicated to all those who have a connection to the deep south (the deep-deep south) and who miss the sounds and characters of our avian cousins there. Its second installation was in the Claudia Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the Cinema/Chicago Summer screening of the Australian film Mountain, hosted by the Australian Consulate in Chicago on 25 July 2018.

Chatterbox is one part of The Atlas of Feathers: an expansive seven-part multi-movement electro-spatial composition based on Australian birds in their environments. Birds heard and imagined in Chatterbox include that quintessential tattler, the Lyrebird, Kookaburras and Noisy Friarbirds.

About David Worrall: Dr David Worrall is an Australian composer, researcher, academic and polymedia artist. He studied music composition, philosophy and mathematics at Sydney and Adelaide universities (composition with Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Richard Meale and Tristram Cary) and has taught at Melbourne University and the ANU, where he established and directed the seminal Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology (1989-2000). Before being appointed Professor and Chair of the Audio Arts and Acoustics department at Columbia College in 2016, he spent three years as a sonification research at the Fraunhofer IIS Institute in Germany. His new book for Springer-Verlag, Sonification Design: From data to intelligible soundfields is due out in December. David lives, with his wife Rebekah and two children, in Chicago. For more information about his work, visit his artist's website: avatar.com.au.