I found David Dunn’s article Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred to be an interesting observation between the relationship and importance between music and sounds of the natural world around us. In fact sound is a key to our way of understanding and making sense of the world, much how we like to think of eyes as being a key tool to helping us comprehend our surroundings. In particular I thought it was interesting, when David Dunn discussed how musicians think about music as more than something to simply amuse ourselves. How music and audio in inherently human as we were previously surrounded and immersed in the sounds of the natural world. This reading and our exquisite corpse project have made me more consciously aware of my surroundings and the innate qualities of the sounds around us in not just nature but part of our everyday lives. We are surrounded by natural music that we often do not stop to think about.
The part of the reading from David Dunn’s article Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred that I found most interesting was the section where he discussed his work with Mimus Polyglottos and the mockingjays. Dunn’s discovery from this project came about because he was living behind/near a zoo and would hear these animal noises, he later discovered that it was actually the mockingbirds mimicking the sounds they observed from the zoo. He then moved on to playing very electronic and technological sounds, and the birds also attempted to recreate these sounds, just like natural sounds they observed. I found this to be a very interesting interaction between the natural world and technology, almost in a reverse of the way we typically think of it. It’s interesting how we often shame or frown upon technology, however it is interesting to see the natural world also interacting with. I thought it perfectly illustrated the idea of digital art, it can be this complex relationship between technology and nature.
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