Alice Boyd

Listening has been both a tool for me to get outside and then in return has given me much more of an appreciation for what we have.

Would I consider myself a birder?

I think I'm definitely a bird listener.

I would say I'm a bird enthusiast.

My name's Alice Boyd.

I'm a musician and sound artist, and I'm interested in exploring the natural world and our place within it.

I work across a few different things so I make my own music, I perform it, I also do quite a lot of radio and podcast work and a huge part of my work which sort of bridges it all together is I do field recording which is when I go out into the outdoors and record the sounds around me.

And I think this began for me during the first lockdown.

I was suddenly in a bit of a limbo because all of my work up to that point was very much live and in person.

So all of that work disappeared.

Around that time, I was reading a book called How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy.

which is by Jenny O'Dell.

And in it, she talked about how she built a relationship with the bird life around her when she would visit this garden near where she lived.

And she slowly over time started to learn the different bird song.

And she talked about how it was almost like meeting her neighbours and suddenly knowing your neighbours' names.

And for her, she could then suddenly get this 360 sonic understanding of who was around her.

And she'd be able to go, oh, yeah, that's the blackbird over there.

That's a chiff chaff.

That really inspired me to want to then have that same understanding myself.

It's like having an extra layer of understanding on the world around you.