UMAP path and spectrogram.
Siren immerses listeners in Lewandowski’s detailed recordings of humpback whale song, made with pioneering bioacoustician Katy Payne and the Hawaii Marine Mammal Consortium in 2019. Lewandowski and McDonald’s analyses of these recordings find their creative expression through McDonald’s captivating and machine learning-driven synesthetic lighting design, which is vividly projected onto Rubin's elaborate sculpture made from marine debris recovered from the ocean around Cape Cod. The Siren installation draws audiences into a thick mix of the interior and exterior worlds of humpback singers, resulting in both a call to beauty and a call to action to protect marine mammals from entanglement.
“Siren: Listening to another species on Earth” (2021, 40 minutes)
By Sound artist Annie Lewandowski, and artist and coder Kyle McDonald
Scenic design by Amy Rubin
Commissioned and produced by Media Art Xploration
Kay Matschullat founding producer
Scientific advisory by Katy Payne
Recordings made in partnership with the Hawaii Marine Mammal Consortium
This work was supported by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability
Technical support provided by the Center For Coastal Studies
Made possible by the support of the Science Sandbox (an initiative of the Simons Foundation)
