Why wouldn't you stream an inter-species musical collaboration with 300 turkeys on Thanksgiving?
“Turkey Song” is a form of inter-species music; a joint communication between three human beings and three hundred tom (male) turkeys. The tape that you hear is an edited version of over five hours of tapes recorded at the Willy Bird Turkey Farm in the hills outside of Santa Rosa. The producer of this piece, Jim Nollman, has been experimenting with musical communication with various animals for many years. Besides turkeys, he has found that the bobwhite, the kangaroo rat, hummingbird, and the bullfrog all respond in definite patterns to certain types of human and instrumental sounds. But of all the animals, the most obviously receptive creature to audio stimulus is the turkey. Turkeys respond with a precise rhythmic gobble to any pitch above a certain register. The pitch is relative and is dependent upon the environmental noise already present. It thus becomes possible to devise extremely precise melodic and rhythmic patterns, and by accenting one note of the pattern by its loudness of pitch the turkey will always respond in time.
All sound available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license from the Other Minds Audio Archive on archive.org. Originally broadcast on KPFA in 1974.
Icons from the Noun Project: – Turkey by Nook Fulloption – Stool by Stefania Bonacasa – Microphone by Blaise Sewell
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