In the same way a vocoder can turn human speech into robotic tones, this innovative tool does the same for birds.

If Aphex Twin had a bird feeder, this is probably what it would sound like.

At the intersection of ornithology and rave culture lies a bizarre and brilliant musical experiment, a new digital instrument that transforms birdsong into acid techno in real time. Developed by Philippe Esling and the team at ACIDS Paris in collaboration with IRCAM, the French institute for sound innovation, the project is as technically impressive as it is absurdly entertaining.

For a project rooted in avant-garde research and deep neural networks, it’s surprisingly accessible. At its core is a model called RAVE (Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder), designed for neural audio synthesis and housed inside Ableton Live via a MaxMSP object. While that may sound like a tangle of technobabble, it’s surprisingly intuitive: take a field recording of birds chirping, feed it into the software and watch it mutate into TB-303-inspired basslines.

In the same way a vocoder can turn human speech into robotic tones, RAVE does the same for birds, like a Roland 303 possessed by a parakeet. The controls for the neural model’s latent space are mapped to a MIDI controller, allowing users to manipulate the generated sound live and shape chirps with the twist of a knob.

The entire system is open-source and freely available on GitHub, inviting producers and artists to fly with their own ideas. You can find out more here.