Marguerite Humeau‘s The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic.  The designer, Marguerite Humeau, aims at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract. This is problematic from the scientific point of view: since the vocal tract is made of soft tissue, and as a result does not fossilize. The only things preserved through time are the surrounding bones. The inner parts have to be redesigned.

The performance consists of three sculpted skulls of prehistorics mammals, a Mammoth Imperator (-4,5 MYA), an Entelodont “Terminator Pig” (-25 MYA), and an Ambulocetus “Walking whale” (-50MYA). Two speakers are embedded in each creature with the sound resonating through sculpted cavities.

Each creature plays a repertoire of calls that are the result of an evolutionary process deriving from an initial call into a tree of related sounds. Once a seed sound is designed, two clones are created with some random variation in their articulation and melodic structure. The process is then repeated for each cloned sound, creating a fast growing variety of sounds with each new generation.

View Marguerite Humeau‘s  website