Yes. At last. It's finches playing guitars. Artist Celeste Boursier-Mougenot was trained as a musician and a composer. He specialises in "drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways."
His instillation at the Barbican Centre is a walk-thru aviary for a flock of zebra finches. They actually fly around you. The aviary is furnished with perches of electric guitars and cymbals. As the birds go about their daily life, settling on the instruments, making nests and eating, they create an ambient musical sound, which I thought rather lovely and oddly humbling.
I asked one of the Barbican attendants if being in the aviary every day was driving her bananas (it's here for three months, two of which have already past). She said no, it wasn't driving her bananas. She loved it. The music was different every day. Did some of the finches, I asked, have greater musical ability than others? Not that she'd noticed, she said, before distracting herself by telling off Oliver for twanging a guitar string.
A couple of the finches landed on a man's rucksack and hopped up to his shoulder where they were happy to stay. Daisy saw this and committed the rest of her time in the aviary to standing still so that a finch would land on her shoulder. The finches, however, knew the difference between a fender stratocaster and a small set of shoulders and stayed dedicated to their musical cause. I then noticed that a few finches were having a break near the fire extinguishers and suggested to Daisy she should try sitting down near them. She did and they flew away.
Finch photography was forbidden, hence no actual footage of finches playing guitars.
There is however a video on this link...
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