2019.07.21 Australian Magpies Improvising On a Melodic Motif Before Dawn by Hearing Beings published on 2019-07-24T07:34:24Z About two or three weeks before the date of this recording, I noticed that, in the hours before dawn, the local Australian White-backed Magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen telonocua) had started singing and improvising with a rather lovely melodic motif that I had never heard them singing before (in four years of living in this location). I finally got the opportunity to record them on a dead-calm Sunday morning. In this recording, the melodic motif is heard in the first call, from the magpie in the mid-ground to the left (fascinatingly, this magpie seems never to vary from singing the pure motif). The magpie in the foreground to the right seems to be improvising on this motif (and just as fascinatingly, it seems never to repeat it exactly in its pure, simple form, as presented by the magpie to the left). Every now and then, though, they sing it together: motif and improvisation superimposed on one another. A few of the more distantly audible magpies might also be participating in the musical exchange. And, at one point, there is an unexpected contribution from an entirely different species of bird (which may have been chiming in, occasionally, very subtly, all along?). Also occasionally to be heard in the background are the locally omnipresent grey-headed flying foxes (fruit bats), and a ring-tailed possum. And the local town hall clock tower bell ringing out the fifth hour of the morning (from a distance of 2 kilometres, as the bird flies). Recorded around 5 am with a pair of MKH 8040s in NOS array into a MixPre-6. (Best listened to with good quality headphones with a flat frequency response.) [Remastered version uploaded 25.11.19.] Please enjoy also: https://soundcloud.com/hearingbeings/20190814-australian-magpies-improvising-on-a-melodic-motif-before-dawn-one-month-later. Photo credit: Philip Roetman, https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/57591728, under a CC BY-NC License. (Photo of Gymnorhina tibicen telonocua taken locally in December 2019.) Genre Field Recording Comment by Laura Sebastianelli very interesting bird sound! 2020-03-26T12:01:53Z Comment by World-Sounds.org They are very musical. Much more so that our European equivalent. 2019-11-22T09:31:23Z