The music of everyday life – like that found in the melody of bird calls – can sometimes fade to white noise in our day-to-day routines. When Mallory Chipman, Bachelor of Music in Jazz and Contemporary Popular Music, Performance ’15, rediscovered the familiar sound of a white-throated sparrow while camping, it sparked a sudden inspiration for her next project.

“I’ve heard that call a million times. It’s funny how it just hit me in that moment,” says Chipman, who is also a sessional instructor in the Department of Music. The call, she says, reminded her of the score from a movie she watched in her childhood, and it drove her to look into the use of bird song in music.

Bird calls have been used as inspiration throughout history, though Chipman notes that they’ve been primarily used in classical or jazz works, rather than contemporary music. She considered how interpretations of bird calls might come across differently in lyrics than in instrumentals.

“Lyric music has this great legacy of being able to communicate powerful messages, galvanize people, call people to action, and provoke thought,” she says. Using bird songs as seed melodies, she wrote lyrics that draw attention to the issue of declining bird populations and waning biodiversity. “Being from Alberta, I have a close connection to these specific birds and I know their calls. And so I set my lens specifically to at-risk or declining bird species populations that we have here in Alberta.”

After hearing that first call of the white-throated sparrow, Chipman set out to capture audio, but because endangered and at-risk birds have such low numbers and often live in remote areas, finding them in nature wasn’t a realistic option. So Chipman wrote a list of bird species that were declining, and headed to bird sanctuaries and observatories throughout the province to observe them. The day after her inspiration struck, she was using her phone to record bird calls during a visit to the Boreal Centre for Bird Conservation near her campsite.

The final clip she recorded was done right here in Edmonton, where she joined a volunteer group who protect peregrine falcon hatchlings from falling from nests.

“I recorded the feeding call of the fledglings. And by the time I had done that, I thought, okay I have plenty now, and I'll have to pare it down.”

In the end, she chose five audio clips, transcribed them into western music notation and incorporated them as instrumental and vocal melodies and motifs.

Through her research into zoomusicology, the study of animal music, she found similarities between her own voice and those of the birds she was studying. She crafted her lyrics not only around sustainability and biodiversity, but about the specific birds she recorded and the type of calls she used in the songs. The feeding call she recorded from the peregrine falcon fledgling, for example, became the song “Mother,” which discusses the nurturing and protection that a mother falcon offers her baby.

The project became part of her ongoing master’s thesis research, titled “Untamed Melodies: Songwriting, Conservation, and the Music of Alberta Birds,” and resulted in a Sound Studies Institute event at the University of Alberta last fall where she discussed her findings. When it came to actually recording the music, however, Chipman focused on four of the five original compositions. She released them earlier this month in an EP called As Though I Had Wings.

“I only had enough funding to fully flesh out four songs with the full band. I think the reason I chose those four is just because of the experiences I had capturing those calls,” she explains. 

Following the time she’s spent listening to and analyzing the musicality of bird calls, Chipman says that she’s been paying more attention to the unassuming noises all around her.

“There are all these sounds that we interact with all day that can be a rhythm, or maybe an interval or a tone,” she says. “It’s really tuned me in to other sources of inspiration.”