SILENT SUMMER
A Device to Call to

Songbirds with Citizen-Recorded Birdsongs

Harvard University
Graduate School of Design
Harvard Office for Urbanization
(2024)

MDes Open Project
Advised by Charles Waldheim

AUDIO AVIARY is a bird sound installation at Gund Hall. In opposition to its colonial history of capture and ecological conquest, this Aviary is positioned not a technology of capture. It is instead a sort of telephone. Public participants use the installation to call, sing, to surrounding birds. Speakers then transmit ‘citizen’-recorded sounds from Cape Ann to Cambridge — rehearsing a call, between the places where threatened species live now and the environments they will adapt to. In attuning to these changes, we participate in their collective sounds for an interspecies future.

AUDIO AVIARY is a bird sound installation at Gund Hall. In opposition to its colonial history of capture and ecological conquest, this Aviary is positioned not a technology of capture. It is instead a sort of telephone. Public participants use the installation to call, sing, to surrounding birds. Speakers then transmit ‘citizen’-recorded sounds from Cape Ann to Cambridge — rehearsing a call, between the places where threatened species live now and the environments they will adapt to. In attuning to these changes, we participate in their collective sounds for an interspecies futur