Bird sounds at the crack of dawn are not part of everyones morning. If you live in a city, theres a good chance that bird populations have migrated elsewhere, as they struggled to compete with urban lights and sounds. That inspired artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg to question what would happen if birds disappeared altogether. How would the dawn chorus change?

Alexandra Daisy Ginberg's Machine Auguries, 2019. Installation shot from 24/7 exhibitionat Somerset ... [+] House, London, open 31 Oct 2019 23 Feb 2020. Commissioned by Somerset House and A/D/O by MINI. With additional support from Faculty and The Adonyeva Foundation.

Ginsbergs work Machine Auguries, which uses artificial intelligence to mimic bird sounds, was commissioned by Somerset House in London. Its currently part of an exhibit at FACT in Liverpool, which recently reopened after Englands latest lockdown. The work was also one of this years ten Science Breakthroughs of the Year at the annual Falling Walls event in Berlin. Being entirely online this year, the event didnt fully do Machine Auguries justice. Its an immersive work, meant to be experienced by walking inside of it.

When you go into the installation, you're in the silvery blue light of the pre-dawn, says Ginsberg. The first bird sings, and it's a real bird. Then you hear another bird sing from somewhere else in the room also a real bird. And then you hear the first machines bouncing back.

This call-and-response between artificial bird sounds and the recorded sound of real birds in mimics how birds communicate. But the way the generative adversarial network

(GAN) learns how to make bird sounds also resembles how real birds learn to sing. One bird sings and another bird copies it in response.

To create this collection of artificial bird sounds, Ginsberg worked with physicist Przemek Witaszczyk, sound recordist Chris Watson, and several others. One of the challenges they encountered is that they would need a collection of bird sounds with very little variation in ambient sound, to prevent the AI from interpreting background noise as bird song. Through the British Library they found a collection of dawn chorus sounds recorded every day for a year in the same location. They also used the website xeno-canto, where people share bird sounds from around the world, to get species-specific recordings, and with this and other collections they had a wide variety of training data for the GAN.

The work includes artificial bird sounds taken at different points in the AI training process. We wanted to show this evolution, says Ginsberg. The beginning of the piece has the first attempts, which are very clunky, noisy and weird. But over the next ten minutes, the machine ones become increasingly lifelike.

With Machine Auguries, Ginsberg wants to encourage people to think about the birds around them and reflect. Do you normally hear a dawn chorus where you live? If not, why not? Whats happening to the birds? And what would it be like if we lost this altogether?

Recently, Ginsberg moved from London to the countryside, and suddenly she hears birds real birds around her every day. She has also started to take up gardening, but thats part of the preparation for her next large exhibit: Ginsberg has recently been commissioned to create a new permanent installation for the Eden Project.

The Eden Project consists of several biodomes and a large garden in a disused clay quarry in Cornwall, England. With a mission to educate people about plants and the environment, the organisation regularly works with artists to start conversations around conservation, and the site includes several permanent and temporary artworks.

But Ginsberg didnt want to build yet another physical structure. Instead, I said, why are we making an artwork for humans? Lets make one for pollinators!

The proposed project is a garden on a 45- by 30-meter outdoor plot, designed using an algorithm that creates the perfect garden for different types of pollinators, including bees, moths and butterflies.

Prepatory sketch suggesting what the final pollinator garden at the Eden Project might look like.

But its not all for the bees: Theres an interactive element for humans as well. The algorithm used to design the garden will be made available online, so that people can create their own unique garden.

Ginsberg is looking forward to seeing the outcome of the interactive part of the project. I hope that for people who aren't experienced gardeners, this might be a fun way to plant something that they might never have planted and be guided through it. And they can say, here's my artwork.

Like Machine Auguries, Ginsbergs upcoming work for the Eden Project combines technology with ecology to encourages visitors to reflect on our interactions with the natural world whether thats waking up to bird song or creating a garden for bees.

Disclaimer: I was a recipient of a Falling Walls / Berlin Science Week journalism grant, and participation in this programme introduced me to Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and her work.

More here:

Award-Winning Artwork Uses AI-Generated Bird Song To Recreate The Dawn Chorus - Forbes