The Lark is My Morning Alamer (Dawn Chorus)

The Lark is My Morning Alarmer is another experiment in what I think of as "ambient webpages" - works of sound art that use the affordances of the web to create pieces that are not necessarily watched or interacted with, but simply inhabited. As per Brian Eno's ambient music definition, they are as ignorable as they are interesting.

Alongside a few other experiments, this particular project grew out of my involvement with Janek Schaefer's Found Soundscape in 2015. Writing about that project, Janek referenced an earlier influence: Radio Birdsong, a short-lived UK digital radio station that simply broadcast a recording of a rural location.

Janek wrote:

"Foundsoundscape was inspired by the very first Digital Radio station in the UK, that simply played a recording of a rural location. Radio you could just leave running to add a peaceful ambience to your environment indoors."

Facebook's "On This Day" feature reminded me of my own brief obsession with Radio Birdsong in the early 2000s. Perhaps this idea of a radio station that did almost nothing - a stream of environmental sound existing alongside everyday life - stayed with me more than I realised.

It may seem strange for a sound artist to find inspiration in a gardening writer, but these words from one of Monty Don's Guardian columns have always stayed with me:

"When I was a student, my father made me a tape of the dawn chorus in early March, standing in his garden at 6am with primitive tape recorder, and sent it to me. I could only bear to listen to it once. It was a heartbreaking, deeply disturbing sound, like glimpsing someone you love passing on a train. The robin, blackbird and thrush slowly breaking the dark and going insane with song as the dawn rose."

Those words resonated because they reminded me of my own relationship with dawn choruses. I grew up in what was technically a biggish town rather than the countryside, but compared to my later life in Sheffield it felt like a rural upbringing and the dawn chorus was part of the background of childhood waking me up in the morning - a sound that was simply there, and perhaps taken for granted.

After reading Don's words, I set about recording my own dawn chorus one summer morning. That recording was accepted into the British Library's Sound Map of Britain (a project which now appears to have disappeared from the web). I've now lived in urban Sheffield for longer than I ever lived "back home" and I thought perhaps those particular dawn choruses are now memories. In a postscript to my original essay on this piece I note that having small kids recently reacquainted me with the wee small hours and I realised that dawn choruses even here in Sheffield are still present, albeit dominated by pigeons, crows and other urbanised species.

In 2017, as something of a sideline in my PhD research, I made a piece called Syrinx: The Transfiguration of Donald Trump which took the then-president's Twitter feed and applied some transformations to trigger birdsong culled from xeno-canto. I realised that I had accidentally created something like a portable, virtual dawn chorus. There were, however, limitations. No matter how fiendish the transformation processes, the overall sonic character tended towards repetition. A single source text, even one as prolific as Trump's Twitter feed, eventually settled into a recognisable texture and the piece responded to bursts of activity rather than a continuously changing environment.

I wanted to create something more layered, more organic. The vast archive of xeno-canto, containing tens of thousands of recordings, offered a possibility: a chorus assembled from countless individual acts of listening and recording.

Syrinx itself fell silent as first Trump was kicked off Twitter and then, as it transitioned to becoming X, it was no longer possible to access tweets as data.

The technical pieces came together building on earlier experiments. Nochevkoy had already given me the architecture for a webpage that could determine its output by the position of the sun, while the xeno-canto API allowed searches by geographical location. The idea followed naturally: if dawn is always happening somewhere on Earth, then the web can become a mechanism for finding those places and bringing their sounds together. By calculating where the sun sits between approximately -12 and 1 degrees relative to the horizon - a rough calculation of dawn - the piece can search those regions and request recordings from nearby locations. The result is not a real dawn chorus, but an imagined one: an impossible meeting of birds separated by continents and oceans.

To my amazement, in 2017 I got it working and The Lark became one of my favourite experiments in sounding webpages. Revisiting it periodically, I was genuinely disappointed when it fell silent due to technical hiccups - over time, CORS proxies disappeared, API endpoints changed, and in 2025 xeno-canto introduced registration requirements partly in response to automated harvesting of its data by AI systems. I occasionally patched it up, discovering new proxy services and so on, but my old code was creaking. In 2026 I set about a full overhaul of the code (taking full advantage of code co-piloting tools which are revolutionary for amateur coders like me).

The principles of the piece have not changed but the architecture is, for now, a lot more robust. However, this piece, like others I've worked on, demonstrates one of the recurring problems with web-based artworks: their dependence on fragile external systems. This piece relies on services outside my control. There is a strange irony in a piece about a constantly changing natural environment being threatened by the changing environment of the web itself. The dawn chorus continues; whether this digital version can continue with it remains uncertain.

Sheffield, August 2026.

I've archived the original version of this 'about' essay, which lived on the original webpage here.