This sound art installation explores listening modalities across borders: from real and imagined locations defined by bird vocalizations to hybrid acoustic spaces connecting ideas of traveling, migration, and politics across geographical and natural contexts.

Ecophones 01 and 02 give audiences access to current bird vocalizations captured by the Birdweather network (https://www.birdweather.com). Birdweather is an uneven network of listening stations distributed around the world, connecting sites at the intersection of citizen science, bird habitats and AI.

Ecophone 01 uses the international telephone country code system to allow participants to dial a country, connect to a related Birdweather station, and listen to the most recently recorded bird vocalization in that location.

Ecophone 02 allows specific bird species to call the audience (phone rings) whenever a new recording of this species has been added to the Birdweather database. The calling species are site and season/climate specific. For an October exhibition in Catania, Italy, we focused on peak migration species on their way from Sicily to Africa.

Ecophone 03 is based on sounds streamed by a microphone (built into a locus sonus streambox) installed outside the stratozero.net artspace in Singen, Germany. Every time a train passes by the artspace the phone rings at the exhibition site and triggers pre-recorded sounds that mix with the realtime sounds in Singen. The prerecorded sounds are contributed by sound artists around globe, these range from field recordings in trains and train stations across Europe (Patricia Jäggi, Switzerland), to soundscapes in Kolkata, India (Abinash Mallick, India) and from AI-generated bird vocalizations (Studio McMullen_Winkler, USA) to the sounds of renewable energy power plants across Europe (Christoph Brünggel, Switzerland). The idea of the train is central to Ecophone 03 as both a functional and metaphorical element, transporting sounds from far-away places (existing in the physical world and digitally generated) into this hybrid soundscape. A web-only version of Ecophone 03 can be accessed at: https://gardensandmachines.com/Ecophones/en.html

The choice of the rotary phone as a physical interface in this installation is important for its inherent symbolic qualities: as an iconic object it represents the act of listening in real-time and the collapse of spatial distances. The seemingly complicated act of dialing a number highlights deliberate choices leading to more intentional listening experiences. Finally, the urgency of the phone’s ringer calls attention to the significance of the calls that are received.

Credits: Lilian Zhao (web programming)