Before sunrise, a redstart begins his solo with a warbling call. Other birds respond, together creating the dawn chorus: a back-and-forth that peaks thirty minutes before and after the sun emerges in the spring and early summer, as birds defend their territory and call for mates. Light and sound pollution from our 24-hour urban lifestyle affects birds, who are singing earlier, louder, for longer, or at a higher pitch. But only those species that adapt survive. Machine Auguries questions how the city might sound with changing, homogenizing, or diminishing bird populations.

In the multi-channel sound installation, a natural dawn chorus is taken over by artificial birds, their calls generated using machine learning. Solo recordings of chiffchaffs, great tits, redstarts, robins, thrushes, and entire dawn choruses were used to train two neural networks (a Generative Adversarial Network, or GAN), pitted against each other to sing. Reflecting on how birds develop their song from each other, a call and response of real and artificial birds spatializes the evolution of a new language. Samples taken from each stage (epoch) in the GAN's training reveal the artificial birds' growing lifelikeness.

The composition follows the arc of a dawn chorus, compressed into ten minutes. The listener experiences the sound of a fictional urban parkland, entering in the dim silvery light of pre-dawn. We start with a solo from a lone "natural" redstart. In response, from across the room, we hear an artificial redstart sing back, sampled from an early epoch. A "natural" robin joins the chorus, with a call and response set up between natural and artificial birds. The chorus rises as other species enter, reaching a crescendo five minutes in. As the decline starts and the room illuminates to a warm yellow, we realize that the artificial birds, which have gained sophistication in their song, are dominating.

Links: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/machine-auguries

Machine learning: Dr. Przemek Witaszczyk (Faculty)
Sound design: Chris Timpson (Aurelia Soundworks)
Research/Design: Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Johanna Just, Ness Lafoy, Ana Maria Nicolaescu
Birdsong consultant: Chris Watson
Birdsong recordings: Chris Watson, Geoff Sample, The British Library, Sara Keen, Xeno-canto
Lighting design: Lucy Carter
Associate to Lucy Carter: Sean Gleason
Production: Angharad Cooper
AV: KSO
With thanks to Professor Ben Sheldon, Maria Diaz and Dr John Mansir of Faculty and Karishma Rafferty, Somerset House

Commissioned by Somerset House and A/D/O by MINI. With additional support from Faculty and The Adonyeva Foundation.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (GB) is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and conservation, she investigates the human impulse to "better" the world. Daisy is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD, at the Royal College of Art , interrogating how powerful dreams of "better" futures shape what we design. Daisy exhibits internationally, including at MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy, and her work is in museum and private collections.