Kelly Heaton Turns Old Analog Circuit Boards Into Mesmerizing “Singing Birds”

Rithika Biswas
Rithika Biswas June 13, 2022
Updated 2022/06/22 at 10:47 AM

Kelly Heaton is a multimedia and cross-disciplinary artist. Her creativity combines electrical engineering with sculpture; illusion and fashion. With an uncanny resemblance to songbirds, her circuits are known for their beautiful humming.

This creative polymath, who calls her field “creative electrical engineering”, loves to create “life-like circuits”. Heaton starts by printing bird circuits from old analog clocks & hardware.

With life-like quality technology, Heaton claimed to have produced all the “chirps” and “singings” analogically.

The avian mimics sounds akin to a vintage synthesizer.

Click here to listen. 


The “birds” are made to ‘generate audible waveforms akin to musical instruments being played.

Heaton says that there is no software or audio playback involved. A perfect replica of avian sounds is created using electronic hardware, which is based on natural vibrations.

Kelly can alter the ‘song’ sung by her avian creations by adjusting a knob. This leads to a change in the resistance of the circuit.

This feature is similar to that of the neurological activity of an actual bird and the reason why they sing different tunes in different situations.

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Along with the auditory features, her avian creatures have visual features as their bodies light up as they ‘hum tunes’.


She managed to perfectly connect a living being to her creation and this was very confusing to her patrons. Heaton stopped using the opaque body as per circumstance. 

She opted for a bridge to connect her raw circuits and wires to the familiar body of the sculpture.

Heather supported her idea with, “Singing circuits demonstrate the principles of machine intelligence and bring us closer to machines”.



These famous Circuit Bird sculptures are on view as a part of Circuit Garden on Manhattan West of New York City. 

Click here to watch. 

A few other famous art works by Kelly Heaton are on display all over the country and overseas.  For example, some of them are at DeCordova Sculpture Park, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, and the Bitforms Gallery.

 

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