The Chester Sound Project was developed in the summer of 2025, partly during a month-long residency at the Chester Art Centre. I started the project as a way to teach myself how to use a shotgun mic to record birdsong around the village of Chester, with the intention of eventually using the recordings in a workshop at the centre and making the site available to the community as a living archive of sound.

The project developed from an archive of field recordings into a series of sound-making experiments in the browser. Birder , a modified version of Strudel.cc adapted for livecoding with bird sounds, was the first experiment; having recently been introduced to this world of programmable music, the recordings became exciting material to play and program with. How does technology enable performance within nature? Garden is a tool for "growable" synthesis, developed while thinking about this kind of performance and sound as evidence of interaction within an ecosystem.

I was also returning often to a few projects I love deeply: Björk’s Biophilia, Sonic Charge’s Synplant, and Google’s Bird Sounds. This project is dedicated to those projects, as well as to the world of weird instruments, the online livecoding community, and the bird enthusiasts of Chester.

A work-in-progress version of the site was used during a workshop at the Chester Art Centre on May 28, 2024, where members of the community came together to learn about field recording and electronic music and to share stories about the sounds of the area. The site continues to serve as a home for the recordings, as well as for the different experiments and instruments that have grown out of them.

To contribute to the Chester Sound Project, email me at marsdoer@gmail.com.

A special thanks to the Centre for Art Tapes for providing the recording equipment.

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my mother saw her father

in the shape of a flying jewel

who hovered by her window

she knew him

by his familiar sound

and so waited

every morning

her ears tuned

to the buzzing on glass

as spring turned to summer

he visited more

how tired he must be

I thought

in the always spinning

as spring turned to fall

he visited less

I saw my mother cry

as I pressed my face

against that cold pane

Imagining her

drinking that nectar

then flying away