Lucy Stevens' audio projects

Wednesday is feeding day

3 Nov 2010

Each Wednesday between 8.30am – 9.30am at the Rally Park, near the canal in Leicester I will thrown a small amount of bread for the pigeons and collect data on the following:

• The total number of pigeons
• The number of pigeons of each color morph (I will focus on 7 different colour morphs)
• The number of courting pigeons (and their colour)

I first started to collect data on Wed 13 Oct and will continue until 30 March 2011. Each month I will send this data to the Cornell Science Lab in NY, to support with their research into why pigeons exist in so many colours.  I will also share the data with Alex Patterson, a young and very talented composer based in Nottingham, who will support with the composition and creation of a piece of music using the data by assigning each colour morph with a key (A – G).  The composition will also take inspiration from the French composer and ornithologist   Olivier Messiaen, who was inspired by bird song and Synesthesia, a neurological condition, in one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently coloured.

Colour morph/Key:

Red= A

Checkered= B

Spread= C

Blue bar= D

Red bar= E

White = F

Pied= G

Courting pigeons= two keys will be played together (depending on the colour) or substituted for a sharp/flat key

Data collected so far:

Wed 13 Oct

Total number of pigeons= 68

Colour morphs:

Red= 11, Checkered=20, Spread= 12, Blue bar= 20,

Red bar= 2, White = 1, Pied= 2, Courting= 0

Wed 20 Oct

Total number of pigeons= 140

Colour morphs:

Red= 10, Checkered= 43, Spread= 70, Blue bar= 6

Red bar= 2, White = 2, Pied= 7, Courting= 0

Wed 27 Oct

Total number of pigeons= 112

Colour morphs:

Red= 8, Checkered= 61, Spread= 23, Blue bar= 13

Red bar= 1, White = 1, Pied= 5, Courting= 0

More images for Project Pigeonwatch

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