Bird Translator
Transforming the human voice into birdsong
In this post we have published a zine from Marylou which describes how she built the Bird Translator. Marylou is a french sound and electronic artist who is passionate about ecology, electronics and DIY cultures. With the Bird Translator she has created a sound machine which takes the human voice in and transform it into birdsong using Pure Data and Bela Mini. Here’s a video of it in action.
A synthesiser for the birds
You can download the full zine here to keep which has embedded links to code and design files. For the blog we have included any relevant links in the caption of each image.
Link to the video; Bela Mini; flashing SD card.
Bela Pure Data Tutorial; Bela Forum; code and materials list.
Text in yellow: “pitch shifter that I found on ‘help->browser->pure data->examples->G09.pitchshift.pd’ and that I adapted to make it stereo”.
PD external ipoke; compiling externals guide; github issue about ipoke. Text in yellow: “Analog input (potentiometer) –> it modulates the delay time. Analog input (potentiometer) –> it changes the feedback amount”.
Pin diagram; complete pin headers for Pocket Beagle.
About Marylou
Marylou is a french sound and electronic artist based in Paris, who has lived and worked in the Netherlands for the past four years. Passionate about ecology, electronics and DIY cultures, she thrives today in the creation of machines and atypical synthesisers which give the study of biosphere and climate change a poetic essence. Her search for understanding the systems of nature takes place within the disappearance of its perceivable world. She finds in the electronic medium an enchanting power, which stimulates each of our senses in an exacerbated way and guides us through finer perceptions and interactions. Using technology as a main medium in the service of biodiversity reports, her work aims to highlight the similarities between these broken ecosystems and electronic interfaces, by making it possible to artificially reconstruct and reactivate nature’s networks.
For more information about Marylou check out her website.
