Magpies, Improvising Musicians?

Tim Curnick

Since losing my work to COVID-19 I have been spending a fair amount around the house. Working nights as a musician meant I would sleep into the mid-morning. Now I get up earlier and I hear my local magpies sing every morning.

On cue with the sun, their calls start and I began to notice similar calls later in the day, but a bit different. As dusk approaches, there seem to be pairs of magpies fighting about our house. I have the same two maggies that began stopping by the garden for a feed of worms, tamed by my neighbour - a proud Greek Nonna - I began watching them most mornings.

I noticed their call is made up of two distinct tonalities and that their song is a kind of call and response. In this case it seems that the female leads the call and the male responds, which triggers a response in turn from the female. The sound they make is actually very complex, the two calls have two distinct timbres – one quite soft tonally, and the other a harsh shriek. If the first part of the call goes unanswered, the song does not go on!

I realised that the urban birds I was watching are classic improvisers – they respond and adapt to the environment and their surroundings, just like I do when performing! I grabbed some magpie footage, and wrote a patch to respond to some music I had improvised earlier in my career that hasn’t been released.