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IMPACT Printmaking Journal | IMPACT Proceedings Vol 3 | 2024
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SONGS OF RETURN
Victoria Arney
As the title suggests, this paper looks at ideas of
passage, accumulation and repetition. I record
birdsong in southern France where I live and work
and make prints by re-visualising them with a
sonogram programme.
I walk and listen to the local terrain and while doing
so am interested in the dynamic changes that
surround me in nature and my emotional meeting
point with them. The arrival, departure and
movement of birds in the environment I would like
to talk about specific works that illustrate how I use
sonograms in the studio and about my low-fi
techniques leading to my work with recordings and
prints as a musical score for improvisation.
ground. They use repetitions and they sing during
the day. However, it is in the theatre of darkness
that the bird is most noticeable, and their song is
extraordinary, particularly when seen visualised on
a sonogram.
This was my rst signicant meeting point with
birdsong. I began recording dierent birds, noticing
particular spots where they congregated, and
noticing how they listened to each other in the
silences. This you can see in the sonograms1.
The first work is a four-metre long woodcut made
from my recording of one nightingale, the motif
having been taken from its sonogram. Nightingales
vocalise by having dierent motifs which they use
in their repertoire of sounds, each bird building up
a vocabulary. I chose the motif that was repeated
by this bird most often in the recording.
My choice of woodcut for this was one of scale; as
I have said, the bird is very present and I wanted
to make something that mirrored the physical
loudness and that had a presence in the space. I
was interested in the notion of looking through
the print and wishing to expand and a kind of
invisibility and movement. The paper I use is thin
enough that it sways and moves as people pass by.
1 http://www.victoriaarney.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/nightingale-
walk-web-1.mov
Figure titles and information:
Figure 1: Nightingale, large scroll
Figure 2: Catalogue of a walk, ASC stairwell
Figure 1
FIRST RECORDED BIRD
The very first bird I recorded was the Eurasian
Nightingale. This bird has 100 variables of clicks,
trills, staccatos and slurs within its vocabulary.
Nightingales arrive in April and leave in early July.
During this time, you cannot fail to notice them as
they are one of the loudest birds here. On one
walk during this period, I might encounter five or
six. Almost always hidden, they nest close to the Figure 2
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I use my woodcuts rather like a library of sentences so they can have
dierent iterations. This second work illustrates the passage that I
wanted the viewers to take with the prints. Suspended over a stairwell
and 10 metres long, it used three nightingale motifs repeated along its
length. Occupying the space, it incorporates the viewer, allowing people
to look up and through the print, its song transparent and echoing on
both sides of the paper.
The QR codes of each nightingale recording were displayed so that
the spectator could play them into the space on their phone, thereby
creating their soundscape, depending on how many people were
present. I am using simple print techniques to look at complex
structures and ideas of language. This installation has time within it,
physically by walking along it and in its use of echoes of sound in the
space. The matrix of print, its ease of repetition, and the use of overlay
have enabled me to construct large-scale installations made by hand
in a low- way. This is inherent in my printmaking practice but it is also
a necessity because of my rural location and the limitations on the
facilities available.
LOW-FI TECHNOLOGY
The programme I use to analyse my recordings is the Cornell University
Raven lite. This app is widely available and it uses sonograms or
spectrograms to distinguish a species. Sonograms are a graph of sound
frequencies across time, rather like standard music notation. They are
read from left to right with high notes at the top, and with longer notes
taking up more horizontal space over time.
The more I recorded the more I listened.
My perception of places changed. I found some places had sound while
others that looked the same had almost none. Through visualising the
sound, I was more able to identify the birds and also to see the
sonogram shapes of the songs in my mind. This meant that I became a
better listener. For example, I could hear the songs more distinctly
because I had accumulated the shapes in my visual brain through
looking at the sonograms.
I became aware of another worldview that existed alongside my own. I
am not a scientist or an ornithologist, but I did notice a slight visual
change in how I was seeing the natural environment, and this led me to
want to make a lasting visual reproduction of something so fleeting and
intrinsically linked to myself and the land.
SONGS OF RETURN #3
As a species, we only comprehend the world in the way we have
developed over millennia. Different senses make for radically different
minds. Analysing the birdsong gave me a knowledge of birds’ otherness
and of a bird’s experience of location, time, speed and place that was
different to mine. We only grasp a fraction of the intonations and vocal
dexterities that individual birds can hear. Birds’ hearing is at a much
Figure 3
Figure 3: Dawn chorus, woodcut scrolls
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faster and higher pitch: they can distinguish sounds in rapid succession
and their time resolution is probably 10 times better than ours, so they
can hear note separation while we cannot.* That is why birdsong often
seems so short. So, to see all of this I slow down the birdsong to
identify these smaller vocal inflexions2.
I tend to work with a window of eight seconds of sound when using the
sonograms; this gives me a fairly clear shape of the sound. I then divide
this for my woodcuts into two seconds of sound for each Japanese ply
panel. So, 48 seconds of recording becomes 24 individual woodcuts.
For the work Dawn Chorus 2020, the recording was incredibly complex,
being full of different birds. Thus, I wanted to create an installation
where the viewer walked between the sound. I used rolls of suspended
paper and divided the recording into parts that I printed up and down
the rolls.
I feel that there is an affinity to the birdsong when working in woodcut.
There is a sense of contact, both literally and ideologically. The
collecting of birdsong involves walking and stopping. Most birds sing in
a wood. This technique allows me to incorporate chance, but a slow
chance, into the work. Once I have my sonogram recording printed out,
I have to reverse it and draw it onto the surface of the wood or plate.
With wood, the grain alters the song, as the ink is taken up and down it.
I mark and cut timelines onto the wood to keep it as close as possible
to the tempo in the sonogram. Somehow, this element of chance
makes the artwork. The sonograms have a surface, of course: the grey
areas the other sounds make give a grainy sense to the surface of the
plate. I am interested in the idea that the sonograms contain some kind
of elemental truth, if you like, a kind of missing reality (Fig. 4).
My most recent woodcut, Atlas winter/spring, was produced using two
sounds recorded in the same place but eight months apart. The first
sound, from May 2021, and the second, from late January 2022, were
recorded using the same method and time frame. I was interested to
see the visual difference in the same place. This is only 96 seconds of
sound, but the complexity is enormous. It was by chance encounters
that these works were made.
I make selections, of course, as I record more than one moment,
but it feels as if these works have infinite possibilities. One last point
about sonograms. They show harmonics above the central note and
reveal other simultaneous notes. Birds can produce more than one
sound simultaneously; they have internal tympaniform membranes on
either side of their syrinx that can be adjusted independently, thereby
allowing two notes to be produced at once.* Not all birds can do this,
but songbirds can, in particular. This is what causes the visual echoes
that are not present when you listen but become structural through the
sonogram.
WORKING FROM A SET SCRIPT
The evolution of birds from reptiles began 200 million years ago. We
only evolved about half a million years ago so the sounds and songs
Figure 4
Figure 4: Atlas Winter/Spring, 2022
2 http://www.victoriaarney.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/dawn-chorus-spring-web.mov
IMPACT Printmaking Journal | IMPACT Proceedings Vol 3 | 2024
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of birds had already been established by the time we were present.
It has been proposed that it is quite likely that early man was hearing
birdsongs not dissimilar to ours today.* It is also interesting to note
that music is something we share only with birds.
The French composer Olivier Messiaen seemed to connect with my
ideas in print. He was a ground-breaking classical composer and an
ornithologist, and he went out and transposed by hand, in note form,
the birdsong that he heard, along with writing poetic passages about
the locations where he heard it. He then used his harmonic frameworks
to explore and develop this birdsong. He developed, in his twenties,
‘modes of limited transposition ‘to work out harmonic scales. Catalogue
d’oiseaux, a piece dedicated to the landscapes and birds of France, is a
huge, ambitious work. In his epic seven volumes of Treatise on Rhythm,
Colour, and Ornithology, he reveals his synaesthetic combinations
of forms and colours that he used for translating his rhythms and time
structures. Always pushing the boundaries, he included books
of notations along with poetic passages of how it felt to be hearing
birdsong in that place at that moment. He used his mathematical
response to birdsong, with complex coding and harmonic limitations,
‘to define unlimited boundaries to work with’. Here is an example of
one of his descriptions of Ushaint, off the West coast of Brittany, and its
defining bird for the work The Curlew.
This is its song: sad slow tremolos, chromatic accents, wild trills,
and a mournful repeated glissando which expresses all the
desolation of the seashore...The water extends as far as the eye
can see. Little by little, fog and the night spread over the sea.*
The boundaries of working within a set script of the sonogram have, in
a strange way, meant that in my work the emphasis has shifted to
colour, scale, surface, structure and sound. It has also allowed me to
expand and explore ideas of time, music collaboration, and working
with specialists in the natural world, such as my ongoing project with
the Parc des Alpilles in Provence, where next year where I will be using
bat sonar recordings to make work. The idea of transcribing birdsongs
back into music became a possibility through my collaboration with Jim
Howard, a musician and trumpet player. This project evolved during
the lockdown. Jim had been following what I had been making and
contacted me with the idea of using one of my scrolls as a musical
score3.
I loved what Jim did. Suddenly the echo back from this work seemed
perfect, particularly as he was vocalising on only one instrument. His
use of echoes and silences fitted perfectly with the earlier recording of
nightingales.
Music psychology has put forth the hypothesis that what makes
music attractive for listeners is its dynamically fluctuating predictability.
That is, by building and breaking expectations on multiple timescales,
music is thought to create a dynamic succession of different feelings.
Songbirds, like musicians, can use drifts or recurring rhythmic motifs to
enable their listeners to form rhythmic expectations, which can then be
3 http://www.victoriaarney.com/collaboration/
IMPACT Printmaking Journal | IMPACT Proceedings Vol 3 | 2024
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fulfilled, delayed, or broken. They might then, like musicians, make use of
note timing to achieve expressiveness, driving their listeners’ expectations,
mixing predictable and unpredictable timing patterns.*
As well as responding to my work as a score, our focus has recently
shifted to corresponding with the coloured sonograms in nine-second
fragments. I send them to Jim with no explanation and he sends me
back the improvisations. This strategy enables both of us to respond
quickly to the birdsong and create ideas, building up a repertoire of
sound which will develop into future visual works and print installations
(Fig. 5).
CONCLUSION: THE RETURN
There are elements of silence or listening that are inherent within a
bird’s vocabulary. If we return to the nightingales, while each bird sings,
taking up much of the vertical space of the sonogram with its dexterity,
it shows it has silences too. This is very marked on the sonograms of
nightingales; that is why I chose these sonograms when working with
Jim, to build up a sense of space and time.
If these improvisations are put back into sonograms, there are
moments when they cross in terms of complexity on the screen. But
what we see in Jim’s improvisations is a simplication of what we hear.
His sounds are visualised and are a step into a visual construction that
is built using long gaps and blocks, creating a slowed-down pitch, and
changing our perceptions of sound within a slowed-down world.
The complexity and constraints of working with these birdsongs
bring a realisation, that their script contains elements of migration,
displacement, acceptance, evolution, biodiversity and survival. They
have an otherness, an urgency within and a connection with the world
beyond. They are like writing fragments from another time, reminding
me of the Roman College of Augury, when bird’s migratory patterns,
calls and ight paths were consulted by the augur before major
decisions.
Ecoliteracy is on the rise with climate sustainability. The ability that the
ancients had to read landscape signs is slowly being re-established
through scientic research; for example through recognising that bird
ight paths can predict tornadoes. Vestiges of these connections exist
in spoken languages all over the world. It is a complex and historically
interwoven subject matter, crisscrossing art, science and myth.
For me, working with birdsong is also about witnessing. Only a few
of my recordings are made in vast woods. The rest are made among
mostly scraps of trees and vegetation left between things. This is
important; we are trawling through these remnants of wildness
in search of clues. Bird populations truly are representatives of a
global community, as they bring with them a voice that denes our
seasons, but which belongs elsewhere, where their journeys began.
Ultimately, the ux and ow of observing one terrain lends an
understanding, an overview, pointing elsewhere.
Figure 5
Figure 5: Nightingale sonogram rose
sound: http://www.victoriaarney.com/wp-con-
tent/uploads/2022/06/Vic-pink-1.mp3
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REFERENCES
Jellis, R. (1977) Bird Sounds and Their Meaning
Messiaen, O. (1959) Book 7 XIII. Le Courlis cendré / The Curlew
Catalogue d’oiseaux.
Roeske, T.C., Kelty- Stephen, D. & Wallot. (2018) Multifractal analysis
reveals music-like dynamic structure in songbird rhythms. Sci Rep 8,
4570. https://doi. org/10.1038/s41598-018-22933-2
AUTHOR
Victoria Arney
UK/France
www.victoriaarney.com
Instagram: @victoriaarney
Victoria has lived and worked in France since 2014. She graduated
in 2012 with an MFA from UAL, winning the Ardizzone Print Award,
the Bambridge prize, Oaksmith Prize and the John Purcell award at
Bite Mall Galleries London. She is a member of the London group and
Graveur Maintenant and she shows regularly in Europe and the UK.
Highlights include The British Museum, Laguna Art Prize Venice, Poori
Art Museum Finland, Southampton Art Gallery, Kyoto Seika University
Gallery, Fleur Tokyo Japan. She was Artist in Residence at the
Bambouseraie France in 2018 and was shortlisted in 2021 for the
French Mario Avati print prize.
Copyright @ 2023 Victoria Arney
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IMPACT Printmaking Journal | IMPACT Proceedings Vol 3 | 2024
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IMAGE GALLERY
Figure titles and information
Figure 1: Nightingale, large scroll
Figure 2: Catalogue of a walk. ASC stairwell
IMPACT Printmaking Journal | IMPACT Proceedings Vol 3 | 2024
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Figure 3: Dawn chorus, woodcut scrolls
Figure 4: Atlas winter/spring, 2022
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Figures 5: Nightingale sonogram rose
Sound: http://www.victoriaarney.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Vic-pink-1.mp3
