Robots that sing with the world: Matteo Marangoni’s cautiously Chorusing Symbionts
Anna Lina Litz
Anna Lina Litz presents a meandering conversation about robots and birds, art and science, wildness and control, based on artist Matteo Marangoni’s work ‘Chorusing Symbionts’, occasionally interrupted by an imaginary walk in the park. This article is part of Writing Wildness, an editorial collection of reflections and insights emerging from the 2025 edition of FIBER Festival. Writing Wildness gathers a constellation of voices reflecting on art, sound, and technology, tracing the many ways creative practices can open new pathways through which to sense and imagine the world.
It’s a cloudy day, not too cold. A Sunday, maybe. You’re walking through a park. Feel free to picture a park of your choice. In any case, your field of vision is full of green, and you hear birds calling, singing. Then the birds pause for a moment, and you hear something else fill in the silence. What is it? You’re not quite sure. A strange, vocal-cordless music. A bird calls out again and the strange music stops, only to return a few moments later. You pause, look around. Maybe you spot the loudspeaker in the understory. Is this a conversation?, you wonder – a duet? You decide to sit down on a conveniently placed bench and listen for a while to the alternating patterns, neither of which you understand. When you close your eyes, the sounds blur together into an unfamiliar but coherent whole. A whole that’s constantly evolving, responding to responses. I’d like to suggest that for a few minutes, you feel bewitched, bewildered.
This is a conversation about robots and birds, art and science, wildness and control, based on Matteo Marangoni’s work ‘Chorusing Symbionts’, occasionally interrupted by a walk in the park. Matteo is an artist and community organiser interested in sonic rituals, DIY media and applied utopianism. He is also a graduate of the ArtScience program at KABK.
Anna Lina Litz: You mentioned that your research question for ‘Chorusing Symbionts’ is whether it’s possible to create interspecies music in which robots and wild animals play together. Have you come any closer to an answer in the meantime?
Matteo Marangoni: The answer I came to is being very careful. Working with wild animals is new for me. It’s very complex, and while I can imagine a lot of things, all I actually want to do for now is work on conflict avoidance. We need to clarify what it means to make music together. We cannot have the perspective of the animal, so we can only speculate whether the animal is interested at all in making music together with humans or robots. So in practice, because we cannot have that information in an objective way, what I’m working with is music made by a human through a robotic device for a human audience, in which the human listener can appreciate both the music made by the robot and sounds made by animals. The animals probably don’t perceive this as music, but we do.
ALL: Because the robot adapts to the sound environment to find the niche that’s still open?
MM: Yeah, that’s correct. So when we’re listening to it, we can imagine it as interspecies music. I think it’s correct to define it as such in the sense that we are listening to both the sounds of the birds and at the same time the music that my robot is making.
Long before you decided to take a walk in that park on some Sunday, its birds negotiated among each other a system for how to hear and be heard. Each species, over time, slipped into its own Acoustic Niche: singing at certain times, at certain frequencies, avoiding overlap that jumbles communication. Do you ever wish you had one, too? An acoustic niche, a defined space in which to speak uninterrupted. When humans talk, it’s based on a system of turns, too. You go, then I go, then you go, and voila! We’re in conversation. While this comes naturally to most, it’s also quite easy to miss a turn and get lost on the country roads of other people cutting mid-way into each others’ sentences. Having a conversation partner/shotgun driver who looks out for your turns is a welcome comfort, don’t you think? On the bench in the park on a Sunday, the robots pause their singing. Offer a turn.
ALL: You mentioned that we don’t know the non-human animals’ perspective on all this. But we know that they do have the ability to react and change their behaviour in response to new things happening in their surroundings. Did you observe anything like that?
MM: Well, I have my subjective experience but I wouldn’t make any claim. I’m really interested in art-science collaborations and I have partners who are scientists working on these kinds of experiments in a very methodical way. I don’t want to alienate my partners, because I really value the relationship. But it’s not only about the relationship. I also value the rigorousness they propose. Although I’m more free, I want to be careful and give myself some limits.
So what is my subjective experience? In the past weeks I have been working on an installation near a forest. The birds are mostly in the forest, so they’re at a certain distance. They’re audible, and sometimes they come around. The installation is on top of some debris that is being pulled out from a canal by a big machine. Some of the animals are interested in worms or other things in this organic pile. So they come and hang around. They land near my loudspeaker and make calls. Maybe they are marking their presence, ‘hey, I’m here!’ Then the reaction of my installation, when it’s working as intended, is to become quiet. I say, ‘okay, now you are here, I’m making space for you.’ I don’t know if the bird finds that more accommodating or not. It’s my attempt at being accommodating.
We’re on a boat now, crossing a river. You’re still in your Sunday-walk clothes, but you’re holding the wheel now, steering and adjusting, steering and adjusting to the wind and waves. Control and communication. ‘Why are we suddenly on a boat?’, you shout to me over the wind, annoyed. ‘Because I wanted to make a point about cybernetics!’, I shout back. ‘And it’s on the other side!’
Cybernetics, a field formerly known as control and communication theory, is a neo-Greek term meaning ‘steersman’. As a discipline, cybernetics is concerned with self-sustaining systems and circular causal feedback: steering, adjusting. Conversation falls under this description, too: listening, responding. Matteo’s singing robots are accommodatingly designed to steer their way, listening, adjusting, into their own acoustic niche.
ALL: Can you tell me more about how you collaborate with scientists for this sort of work?
MM: I did the Master in ArtScience here in the Hague some time ago and I’m really enthusiastic about it. I worked a lot on advocacy for our field and see a lot of potential for it to grow. But it’s much more acknowledged in the arts than in the sciences. Of course, because in the arts there’s freedom, and that’s not the case on the other side. I’ve had collaborations with scientists in the context of residencies, for example at TU Delft or TU Eindhoven. Now, I have a partner at Naturalis Biodiversity Centre. It can be difficult. The scientists have different priorities. Most of the inspiration I get is from reading. And sometimes there will be a meeting with the author, where we can have a conversation. Those conversations can be both helpful and inspiring and also frustrating.
ALL: Why is that?
MM: In order to preserve scientific rigour there is a lot of gatekeeping and putting limits to what you can do.
ALL: Science has more rigid rules...
MM: In science researchers work in narrowly defined domains following very specific methodologies . In this respect ArtScience work can easily appear as unwarranted noise or worse as ‘wrong’ or ‘not allowed.’ As an artist, it can be discouraging, when you wait for months to meet a researcher with the hope of initiating a collaboration, just to leave the meeting with the feeling of rejection, of being incompetent and in the wrong place.
ALL: That’s very interesting, because I have the impression that art-science is often put on a pedestal: art has to build the bridges between the disciplines and in the transitions towards sustainability and digital sovereignty. It’s often propped up as a solution.
MM: Well, I’m skeptical about the solutionist approach.
ALL: Me, too.
MM: I think my role is to make things that are beautiful and inspiring. The way I would describe it is, I love classical music, I love opera, Florence, Michelangelo, you know, this beautiful classic art. But that art was responding to challenges and values from that time. I want to make beautiful art that has to do with the challenges and values of our time. Where exactly the edges of science and technique are is actually questionable. The distinction is artificial. Any time you do something completely new, it has the potential to also generate new knowledge.
To allow or not to allow wildness into our methods? Maybe art-science and interdisciplinary collaboration are positioned as bridge-builders or ‘solutions’ in an effort to ‘re-wild’ the land-locked rigidity of positivist methods of inquiry. Not to discredit the scientific method as less legitimate, but to introduce other, non-dominant ways of knowledge production into its realm: to enter into conversation, however haltingly. Stuck and tired of algorithmic communication? Try artful communication.
ALL: At the end of your talk you shared a quote from James Bridle about machines needing to spend time with the world.1 Do your robots collect data or bring something back? Do we let the machines bewilder us in turn?
MM: When I make these machines, it’s an engineering process. It’s very logical. And I enjoy that process, but then the purpose of the machine in a sense is to help me get in contact with something else. I don’t want to work with machines that only lead me to more machines. The bewilderment process is about how it affects me and how I hope it affects the person who will experience the work.
I’ve worked with artificial creatures for many years and I always made the conscious choice to have no data collection. The creature turns on and starts as if it was just born. Sensory input is used to determine its reactions, but they are very simple creatures. They don’t have any long-term memory. Their purpose is not to be in the world of data but in the world of phenomena and interactions.
The world is not like a computer; computers are like the world. The world is not like a human either; humans are like the world. Computers, birds and humans all share the self-same world, and how could any of us be unlike it?
ALL: You say one of the central concepts in your work is applied utopianism. What do you mean by that?
MM: Well, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. It’s being pragmatic: what can I achieve? But also dreaming at the same time. I guess a lot of different cultures or belief systems are based on some sort of utopianism. There’s some ideal world that we strive for. And the question is, while striving for that ideal, how much attention do we give to what is actually happening? Where do we look for the ideal in what is real rather than what is imaginary? The concept is important, but then the technology and experience are equally important. Otherwise, you get the emperor’s new clothes, some kind of mental telegraphy of ideas.
ALL: Do you have thoughts on the relationship between utopia and wildness?
MM: I’m trying to wrap my head around it. There’s this idea that wildness is traditionally something scary. That we have to regulate the world because life is uncertain and we have to get rid of the uncertainty, but there’s a point where – in cybernetics, you overshoot your target. It’s interesting that the term ‘hunting’ is used to describe the behaviour of a self-regulating system which is oscillating around a target, always overreaching it. In a similar way, control systems might overreach their purpose. When life is too regulated you once again have a desire for something that you don’t have control over, and so you swing back the other way, towards less control.
ALL: So the ideal outcome is something you have some control over, but still does something unexpected?
MM: A lot of the work I make is based on homeostatic principles. There’s always a bell curve where too little is too little and too much is too much, and there’s a sweet spot in the middle. Every organism and every individual has a different sweet spot. You could probably apply that to music, with variation and repetition. If there’s only variation, you can’t find a pattern. And if it’s only repetition, it gets boring. The listener needs to be stimulated just the right amount. How does the artwork do that? And then, computers are very bad at random variation but the world is very good at that.
ALL: It’s also similar to how communication and language work. It’s all patterns, it’s a system. But then you can also come up with sentences that no one ever said before.
In the park where you’re still seated on your bench, listening, the sun is coming out. You feel it speckle your skin where it shines through the leaves and branches. There’s a word for this in Japanese: Komorebi. It’s also the title of one of Matteo’s previous works with artificial creatures, a swarm of robots responding to cues of sunlight through leaves with sound. Much like language (and communication beyond the human), much like our bodies, or bird bodies, or trees, these machines are Open Wholes. Functioning systems in their own right, but open to the shared world they inhabit and unfold in. New meaning is made from doing something together over and over, forming a habit. Words are habits. Most of our computers are not like that. They are automatic machines: their reactions are determined by a fixed original input of data, rather than continuous cues from the world.
ALL: I read an article you wrote about residencies and conviviality, and I was wondering if you’ve ever thought about more-than-human conviviality with your newer work.
MM: Every time I do the work, I try to find humans who are stewards of the animals in that specific space, for example the caretakers of the parks where I place my installations. In one park, I asked the person who runs a botanical garden, where a lot of birds nest: is he worried that when they have festivals with loud concerts nearby, that’s traumatic for the birds or has a negative effect on them? And he was very optimistic. He said no, the birds love it because they know that when the music ends, it’s full of leftover food.
Right now we’re taking the negative approach of conflict avoidance. I’m interested in non-negative approaches, too. For example, there are several studies on what is called acoustic lures. The famous example is playing back sounds from a healthy coral reef to a dying reef to attract back animal life. The baby fish need to hear the sounds to swim back there. You could also use this technique after a forest fire, simulating false advertisements to the animals, but then it starts a positive feedback loop. But we don’t know enough about this yet. What does it actually produce? What are the effects? It’s like black magic. There could be all sorts of consequences that we are not aware of.
ALL: It’s like the debate around deciphering whalesong with AI. Should we play sounds back to the whales once we think we’ve deciphered them? Probably not.
MM: It’s very controversial, understandably, because you’re interfering and modifying. That was the reaction I initially got when I started opening this conversation: No, you must not do this. The ethical boundaries are very different for wild animals as opposed to domestic or laboratory animals. There are some cases in which this sort of communication back to the animals, although it can be perceived as control, is helpful. For example, there’s the case of elephants in Africa where they found out that elephants are repelled by the sound of bees. They put beehives as barriers, so the elephants don’t go into the farms, but you could also put loudspeakers. And the question is, would that be a good idea for whales? Now there are systems in place where they’re listening to whales and alerting ships so that the ships can slow down if they’re in the proximity of a whale. But if we could crack whale language, we could warn the whales: hey, there’s a ship coming. Then who should be getting out of the way? It’s also a question about hierarchies.
‘Chorusing Symbionts’ introduces an element of wildness, or play, into these results-driven attempts to ‘talk to animals’ using new technologies. It’s an artwork and a piece of music which has no functionality or productive outcome beyond an attempt at being accommodating to the birds and beautiful or thought-provoking to the human listeners. If the decoding of whalesong with AI is a theme, chorusing symbionts is a carefully contrarian variation of it. And so, after a while, your bewilderment fades, or it lingers, but in any case you get up and walk away from the bench and the strange concert. Maybe you’ll remember to tell your friend, partner, child, or cat about it later.
ALL: Where can this work be experienced in the future?
MM: We’re going to do a number of installations in 2026. The first one is planned for Amstelpark in Amsterdam, at Zone2Source, in April next year. Then Marres in Maastricht, Zuiderparktheatre in the Hague, and Hortus Botanicus in Leiden.
ALL: I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing it next year. Probably at Zone2Source!
Anna Lina Litz is a writer and researcher living in Amsterdam. With a background in Linguistics and Environmental Humanities, her work focuses on the intersections of language, art, ecology, and sometimes technology and has previously appeared in Robida magazine and The Ecologist. She also publishes regularly on Substack.
From James Bridle, Ways of Being (2022): ‘To have any hope of meaningful communication – with us or with the more-than-human world – machines will need to go out into the world and spend time with it, just as we do when we consciously choose to pay attention.’
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