Collected Huia Notations (like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded)

Collected Huia Notations (like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded) is a work for phonograph, solo piano, and extinct bird. It collates the four known Western musical notations of the song of the Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris), an endemic New Zealand wattlebird of the ancient family Callaeidae, which was driven to extinction in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, partially through the attentions of overzealous wealthy Victorian Ornithologists and Museum collectors.

In developing Collected Huia Notations, the notations were first played on piano (a musical instrument found in most domestic houses in colonial New Zealand) by Pascal Harris in Dunedin, New Zealand, in December 2014. They were then cut to phonographic wax cylinder (invented in 1877, this was the only commercially available sound recording technology available while the Huia was alive) by Graham McDonald of the National Film and Sound Archives in Canberra, Australia, in January 2015. They are played back in the gallery on an Edison Gem phonograph, the smallest and least expensive machine Edison produced, introduced in February, 1899, one intended for domestic use. (Many thanks to The Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania for their kind loan of this machine). The sounds are further degraded and rendered intangible through the successive stages of this translation process, only serving to emphasise their distance, and the lack of accuracy which in empirical terms renders them dubious scientific records.

The work was exhibited alongside works by Alex Bishop-Thorpe and Matt Warren at Constance ARI, Hobart, from 10-31 January, 2015, as part of the Mona Foma 2015 programme.