In Papua New Guinea, Feld had first recorded funerary weeping and ceremonial songs of the Bosavi people in the late 1970s, and he later understood that the songs and weeping he had been sampling were actually vocalized maps of the surrounding landscapes, sung from the shifting, sweeping viewpoint of birds that flew over those spaces, so he started recording birds. After listening to them for some years, he realized that the Bosavi understood birds as echoes or “gone reverberations”—as absence turned into a presence; and, at the same time, as a presence that made an absence audible. The Bosavi
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