Originally Posted By: BabuMusic
Haha. Forked off in 2 different directions. hehe. Man, I like your style and creativity, Mark, but you were wrong about the 1:15 of my life. I went on to Roosterramma then came back to this one again a couple times. Time well spent. I remember seeing Frank Zappa on TV in the 50s playing the bicycle with drum sticks.


Babu, thanks again for commenting, for allowing my music to inspire any association with the music of Frank Zappa, and for mentioning that wonderful TV video. I am very very honored by this particular connection. If I think of myself in terms of any single musician, I think of myself as a very, very, very inferior Frank Zappa.

I do this thing with chicken sounds (and natural sounds in general) as kind of an experiment, and I offer the output as the results of an experiment, and perhaps an engaging novelty. That way, if it's awful I can say, “Well, it was just an experiment!” and if it's at all listenable I can say, “How about that, some of this actually sounds like music!”

But underneath, I’m pretty serious. I get all conceptual and philosophical.

Whenever I come up with something like this that sounds at all interesting or maybe even good (!!) I find myself wondering if I am, with this simple approach of computerized pitch-recognition, unearthing actual latent musical qualities in the source material. Like: I’m expertly using Logic Pro as a tool to bring humanly inaudible chicken music to the surface. I’m tweaking things, for sure, but is there something there to start out with? Or am I “discovering” the chicken song in the way that a sculptor “discovers” the statue within the block of marble, which is to say, not really at all?

When I listen to the very audible mood changes in “Look What” I really do wonder where this stuff is coming from. I didn’t do it, the chickens certainly didn’t do it like THAT, and the human musicians playing didn’t do it. I guess the musicality there is most likely an emanation from the mind of the BIAB programmers behind the algorithms. But I really would like to give as much credit as possible to the chickens.

Again, the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Owen Farm chickenhouse thank you for your attention.