Silent Spring: Sackville/Siknikt
A Choral Performance in the Sackville Waterfowl Park
Directed by Lou Sheppard (Artist in Residence, Struts & Faucet)
And Pamela Hart (The Forever Chorus, Montreal)
Meet Saturday June 8th at 5:30pm at the covered bridge in the Sackville Waterfowl Park. In case of heavy rain we will meet at Struts & Faucet at 7 Lorne Street.
It is hard to imagine the sound of birds that have already gone extinct. There are some bird sounds that were lost before the technology existed to record them. The passenger pigeon was once so common that people described flocks of them as passing clouds obstructing the sun. The noise they made was apparently unbelievable- everywhere from harsh clucks to gentle melodies. It is strange to imagine how the sound of these birds would have changed our sonic environment.
The Sackville Waterfowl Park is home to 160 bird species. The sound of these birds forms a loud and complex chorus. It is incredible, and it is also fragile- bird populations are in decline due to habitat loss and depleted food supplies. The chorus we hear now may not be the same sound we hear in ten or twenty years time. Silent Spring: Sackville/Siknikt sounds what is missing from this sonic environment, as a memorial to what has been lost, and as a hope to draw these songs back to the area.
Our choir will perform the songs of ten bird species who’s population is missing or declining in the Sackville area. Spectrograms are sound images-visual recordings of frequency and duration in a sound. To create Silent Spring: Sackville/Siknikt Lou Sheppard has arranged the spectrograms as a graphic score, and then translated this score into a choral arrangement to be sung into the marsh.