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Sonic Feather (2020)

Sonic Feather (2020)


Sonic Feather is part of Dawn Chorus: an ongoing international sound art and ecological listening project led by Bernie Krause, a pioneering bioacoustician whose work has fundamentally shaped how we understand soundscapes, biodiversity, and the acoustic health of ecosystems. The project invites participants around the world to record the early-morning soundscape of birds at their local sunrise, creating a collective archive of place, season, and ecological presence at a time when many species are under increasing threat.

Co-authored by multimedia artists Marcel Karnapke and Mika Johnson, Sonic Feather is a custom-made digital tool developed for Dawn Chorus participants, allowing them to transform their recordings into unique visual animations that can be shared online. The project is inspired by the idea that scientific data, when translated and reimagined, can also become art, and that this moment calls for closer collaboration between scientists and artists to raise awareness of the accelerating loss of biodiversity.

Sonic Feather echoes the logic of digital painting tools, with one crucial difference: its brush emits sound rather than color. By touching the screen, users activate their recording and begin to draw with audio. The phone becomes a two-dimensional canvas where gestures such as painting, writing, or playing are applied to sound instead of pigment. As the audio is uncoupled from linear time, it becomes an image shaped by the user’s interaction, producing a visual form that is both personal and unrepeatable.

This transformation allows participants to engage with the sounds of the dawn chorus in ways that traditional audio playback cannot. In this way, Sonic Feather offers yet another perspective on listening, encouraging people to see, hear, think, and feel differently about birdsong, soundscapes, and the fragile ecosystems they belong to.
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