Abstract musical notations served to help the group come together in performance and were a mnemonic for the improvisational soundscapes and each performer’s sound presence within them.
It is important to know that Interspecies Music was constituted of all manner of artists whose musical skills and experience varied greatly one from the other. There was a fundamental common belief in the transcendent nature of artistic practices where creativity truly found its form in all manner of media and was not restricted to traditional categories. This meant that a painter or sculptor, or photographer could still engage in meaningful musical improvisation with other performers, regardless of their skill and instrumental expertise.
These are musical transcriptions of the sounds of the Humpback whales and they served as sound outlines for all manner of patterns on motifs to be played on our instruments. What is significant here, is the transcription or transposition of natural sounds into musical form. This practice, though inspired, in part, by Olivier Messian’s Birdsongs, followed an entirely different performative intuition.
