The Magic Hour

For my own piece, my intention is to create a sound installation that takes its inspiration from the ultrasonic biosonar calls of the bats that visit the garden in the evening.  My plan is to position a series of bat detectors along the River Cherwell, which runs alongside the botanic garden, and then feed the output of these into my Kyma system in order to manipulate the sounds and turn them into something musical.

I ordered my bat detectors today from Magenta Electronics who were not only enthusiastic about my idea but also keen to support the project, so that’s good news!

Whilst I’m in Oxford, I am spending my evenings in the Botanical Garden to make more recordings of the bats, and as such think that I am beginning to understand their behaviour a little more – not that this will necessarily be consistent throughout the season, but at least I have something to build on.

They appear to come out around 15 minutes after sunset, and in the area just above the Spring Walk but over the River Cherwell – one or two first of all, then three or four, but probably no more than about eight at peak.  These bats fly mostly between three and five metres above the water, swooping to catch the insects.

Then, as the evening goes on, there is more bat activity further down the river towards the lower end of the Spring Walk and the greenhouses.  The bats that first appear here skim along the surface of the water – two or three at first, and then eventually joined by the swooping bats as mentioned above.

Within about three-quarters of an hour this first rush of bat activity appears to die down and then the bat visits become more occasional, and also involving different species.  Over the next weeks or so I will have a listen to my recordings and see if I can use these to identify what’s visiting, and when.

Worked with the St Barnabas School orchestra today.  I played them examples of how I had been working with the recordings of their predator music that I had made on my last visit.  They liked these a lot and were very excited to hear both how successful their composition ideas had been as well as how I had worked with their music.  Using these recordings as a starting point we then worked on a series of other musical ideas for me to work with and build on the work done so far over their school holidays.

I’m back at the garden again for the next few days, working again with students from St Barnabas’ Primary School.

We noticed today how different insects seem to favour certain coloured plants – for example, the bumble bees were mostly on purple flowering plants.  On speaking with the head gardener about this I learnt that indeed this was the case.  Different insects are attracted to particular colours, smells, pattern markings as well as flower shapes: beetles seem not to have very discriminating colour vision but are more attracted by odour; flies are attracted to yellow, pink or white colours with sweet fragrances; beeflies and hoverflies pollinate blue to purple flowers; butterflies favour blue-purple, deep pink and yellow flowers with a sweet and pleasant smell; moths, being mostly active at dusk, favour white or pale sweet smelling flowers that are easily locatable in dim light; and finally, bees are red-green colour blind but are attracted to yellow, blue purple and ultraviolet flower colourings.

A photographer came to take some photographs for a newspaper today.  Pointing at some blue flowers, he commented that their colour was “unreal”.  I assured him that was not the case.