Artist Marcus Coates talks to Duncan Hall about capturing part of a wildlife phenomenon: Marcus Coates: Dawn Chorus Fabrica, Duke Street, Brighton, Friday, April 3, to Sunday, May 24

FROM a doctor’s waiting room, to a bath, to an underground car park, Marcus Coates’ video installation captures a cast of human beings tweeting and chirruping in their natural environment, recreating a dawn chorus the artist recorded in the Northumberland countryside back in 2006.

Just watching the individual videos on YouTube is a strange experience – so when his full installation of 14 video screens is installed in Fabrica this week it should be unforgettable.

“I wanted to capture a wildlife phenomenon,” says Coates. “Most people don’t have access to it – but it is one of the most remarkable phenomenons of the natural world.

“Scientifically it presents so many mysteries. But it is also part of our artistic and cultural history – it is something artists and poets have talked about for generations. It was something I really wanted to tap into.”

The first stage of creating the installation for Coates was recording the phenomenon for himself. He joined forces with wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample who set up 14 microphones across a patch of Northumberland countryside to capture as many diverse bird species as possible.

“We wanted to be on the edges of two or three different habitats,” says Coates. “We were where moorland and wetland met, but also a location where there wasn’t too much noise pollution. The weather was also a huge problem – it was quite a task to get out of the wind.”

The pair made 500 hours of recordings to get a perfect tape of one morning between 3am and 7am. Coates certainly suffered for his art.

“I’m not really a morning person, but Geoff’s enthusiasm was limitless,” he says. “It was still dark at 3am when the chorus starts – and that was where Geoff was amazing. He wasn’t just able to identify different species, but one morning we had three or four blackbirds singing and he could tell by the signature of their song which was which. His knowledge was fantastic.”

But capturing the song was only the first step. The pair next went into Sample’s studio and slowed the song down by 16 times, to enable the human voice to imitate it.

“I had realised before the project that it would work – I had done it with my own voice,” says Coates. “Slowing it down the high whistling of a thrush or blackbird would sound like a low hum.

“With a tune what sounded like two or three notes turned out to be 30 or so notes when it was slowed down. It was extraordinary music.”

He took the tapes to Bristol, where he began auditioning members of amateur choirs to imitate the slowed down sounds.

“Some species were tricky,” he says. “A robin goes very high and very low, so I needed a certain type of voice that could do both male and female sounds – we were lucky to find a young man who could.”

For the filming sessions Coates asked the chosen singers for locations where they spent their time sitting and doing nothing. I went to film them in their own habitats,” he says. “In the bath, in the car, in the office, wherever they spent a lot of time or liked to sit and think. They sat and listened to the slowed down birdsong in an earpiece and sang along with it, copying it as well as they could.”

Speeding the tapes back up to get the original birdsong Coates discovered a happy accident – that in trying to copy the birdsong, the performers were making birdlike movements themselves.

“It was unexpected,” he admits. “They almost looked like actual birds, taking the same breaths and having to make movements to make the sound. There were very few gaps between some of the songs, so they had to take huge breaths to sing for ages.

“When you see that you realise the bird is expending a lot of energy. When you think about it, it’s singing about survival. They are defending territory, trying to get mates, so they are putting everything into it. The sound is beautiful and romantic, whereas the function isn’t that romantic at all – it’s a battle for survival that exists in nature.”

Presenting the work Coates is able to recreate the same set-up he used for its original screenings at the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art in Gateshead and Picture This’s Atelier space in 2007.

The 20-minute cycle will recreate the experience he had in the Northumberland countryside – not just the sounds but the different locations the birds inhabited as the performers move between 14 screens spread across the height, width and breadth of Fabrica’s space.

“Fabrica has incredible acoustics,” he says. “It will be exciting to see that original version again.

“When you watch you start to reflect on what you’re doing when you make vocalisations,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any other species as complex compared to humans and birds.

“We use a lot of repetition when we sing – even when it is a football chant, the function of the singing and chanting is similar about territory.

“The piece is more about finding out who we are than what the birds are doing.”

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