Listening To Birds

Listening To Birds: An Anthropological Approach to Bird Sounds

This sounds [pun not intended] like an interesting project:

'A two year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council investigating how people perceive, identify and make sense of bird sounds.

What happens when we hear a bird? This is the question at the heart of this project and over the next two years we will be listening to birds with others and finding out how bird sounds become a part of people's lives.

We want to investigate how people listen to birds because we're fascinated by two subjects. First, we are interested in the relationships between humans and birds and the role that sound plays in this. We wish to understand how bird sounds become important and meaningful to people, for example as being evocative of time, place or season. Second, we want to explore hearing and to consider how people become skilled at differentiating what they hear.'