An audio-visual toy created in TouchDesigner.

My parent’s home fosters a very healthy chickadee community, which means there is almost always some frenetic chirping going on. Listen to it long enough, and you start to get a sense of patterns, phrases, and distinct calls. Naturally, you start to wonder what they’re all chirping about.

Birdsigning is a series of 10 hands — mine, captured counting up to 5 — linked up to a wacky range of audio-reactive switches (pictured above). The chirping of birds triggers modulations in which hand you see.

The result gives new form to a largely incomprehensible language, but it’s no more understandable after this translation. Instead, it feels more like another secret code, or some strange sign language.