In the mid 2000s, two Wellington musicians were given a curious task – to recreate the call of the long-extinct moa. So how do you replicate a sound that hasn’t been heard for hundreds of years? Emma Ramsay finds out.
The call of the moa is a sound sure to incite fear in even the most stoic of outdoors people. It’s deep, it’s guttural and borderline reptilian – a sound more at home in a Jurassic Park soundscape than any morning chorus filling up your local foliage. But as moa are thought to have disappeared from Aotearoa five centuries ago, how do we know this eerie warble is close to the real vocal styling of the long-extinct bird?
This conundrum of recreating the unheard was faced by a team of experts assembled by Te Papa in the mid-2000s. Their task was to recreate the dawn chorus prior to human arrival, including the lost voices of extinct birds. The chosen scientists and musicians collaborated over a period of four months from December 2005 to March 2006, eventually recreating the calls of five extinct birds. The recreated call of the moa, as part of this project, remains the standard version used today, whether it be heard on Radio New Zealand or in a video game featuring moa as a convenient mode of transport. The tale of finding this call of the moa is both interesting and unorthodox. At the heart of the story are two Wellington musicians, Jeremy Coubrough and Bevan Smith, long-time friends and collaborators who, under the guidance of ornithologists – and with the help of a ceramic fish and a Nerf gun – unlocked the lost call of the moa.
How it all began
Bevan Smith has been making and producing music since he moved to Wellington in the early 90s. In the windy city he found his passion for sound as he discovered synthesisers and effects units, making electronic music under the names Aspen and Signer and eventually running his own record label. Smith met his frequent collaborator Jeremy Coubrough when Coubrough was still a teen – to Smith’s surprise, “[Jeremy] sent me a demo cassette tape and it had his phone number on it and I rang up the number. I think I was like 25 at the time. I rang up this phone number and his mum answered and said ‘oh no, Jeremy’s at school.’ He was only 15!”
As a highly motivated teen musician, Coubrough would often busk, playing the saxophone in Manners Mall to fund his passion for electronic music. Using his saved money, he hired a minidisc recorder to make a demo that he then distributed around Wellington’s electronic scene – one ending up in the hands of Smith. Smith ended up producing Coubrough’s first album and the two have been working together ever since.
In 2005 a friend of Smith’s drew his attention to a new sound project coming up at Te Papa, recreating the dawn chorus before the arrival of people. It was to be a key feature of the new exhibition Blood, Earth, Fire – Whāngai, Whenua, Ahi Kā. Smith submitted a treatment, an outline of how he planned to approach the project, and was eventually accepted. When asked if he remembers being nervous at the idea of recreating unheard sounds, Smith recalls, “I don’t think I was too stressed about the extinct birds. I should have been! I just didn’t know enough to know how difficult it would be.” Initially Smith was more concerned with technical challenges to do with the available equipment, focusing on how he would layer and choreograph the chorus within the space. While extinct bird calls would be a crucial part of the project, curating the calls and sounds of living birds would make up the bulk of the noise.
The project started with Smith, the scientists and the project designers meeting to discuss the strategy of approaching the extinct birds. The first port of call was looking at close living relatives – in the case of the moa this meant the emu and the cassowary. Smith says he bought CDs of emu and cassowary sounds, studied them and reached out to experts for further advice. As Smith was also juggling other projects at the time he roped Coubrough in to help. Coubrough recalls his early involvement with the moa: “I remember doing a lot of stuff with conga samples, like drums and hand drums, because you can rub them, lick your finger and rub them, and make this ‘oooo’ sound. I think we tried recording percussion like that but… in the end it was more getting samples from percussion libraries and slowing [them] down and stretching [them] out… You might get one second worth of sound with like 12 edits inside of them, fading into different things – really micro-editing, I remember doing a lot of that.” It was tedious, detailed work, reliant on trial and error, as the two musicians searched for sounds and rhythms in the direction mapped out by Te Papa scientists.
The process and finding clues
After the initial strategy meeting, there were a further five meetings where Smith would present their sound samples and receive feedback from the project’s scientists and designers. Coubrough recalls the feedback being conflicted – the suggestions weren’t always unanimous. Despite this, Smith says these meetings were always constructive. “It was always pretty positive. It was always like ‘This one – this one is good, just keep going down this path.’ I remember the first two presentations on the moa were pretty rough… but the staff were all really positive and focused on the elements they liked.”
While looking at close living relatives was an important part guiding the process, anatomy was also a helpful clue. One studied moa skeleton revealed tracheal rings within the main body, meaning their long trachea, as evidenced by their long neck, was actually even longer internally. According to scientists Trevor Worthy and Richard Holdaway, this internal tracheal structure was “far more robust than required simply for breathing” and therefore likely important for making sound. Living birds with similar tracheal anatomy produce low-pitch sounds that travel long distances, leading Worthy and Holdaway to believe it likely that moa had a similar ability.
When it comes to oral histories, few specific insights can be gleaned about the call of the moa. Ethnographer James Herries Beattie spoke with many South Island Māori kaumātua in the early 20th century, recording their stories and those that had been passed down. One person shared a story of the moa, describing a “shrill sound, quite out of keeping with the size of the bird”, while others spoke of the moa’s deep roar. While seemingly contradictory, it is important to note that there are believed to have been at least nine moa species of varying sizes, making a diversity of calls a distinct possibility. As Coubrough and Smith were focused on producing the call of the stout-legged moa, memories of anonymous calls would have given little concrete substance to their quest.
There are also unproved theories that moa became extinct after Europeans arrived. Some early sealers in late 18th-century Fiordland described a large bird they called “the Fireman”, named as its calls were reminiscent of the wooden rattles used by firemen at the time. A Radio New Zealand programme in 1972 attempted to recreate the call of the moa using the description from the sealers. It’s an eclectic compilation of sounds, with the show’s narrator acknowledging “[the] reconstruction is pure guesswork of course, based on the slimmest evidence”.
Another alleged encounter with the moa call comes from geologist Julius von Haast during his search for a “large and unknown kiwi” in the 1860s. When camping during the pursuit von Haast and his team were awoken by a loud bird call, reverend and geologist Richard Taylor was sure it was “the cry of that struthious giant – the moa”. However, many remain sceptical, believing these instances to be cases of mistaken identity. Overall, memory culture around the moa, at most, may suggest a bird that could be heard over great distances – something the moa’s long trachea already indicates.
The blowing breakthrough
The first breakthrough on the Te Papa moa call is preserved on Smith’s hard drive, an audiofile titled “Jeremy blowing into a fish”. The fish in question was a ceramic, ornamental fish and Coubrough, the talented saxophonist he was, had used it to create an “interesting, resonant throaty sound”. Smith recalls thinking, “That’s probably the direction we need to go into… I think we need to make a new sound and it needs to be blowing.” They pivoted away from percussive experiments towards pushing Coubrough’s saxophone skills to the limit.
Jeremy recalls blowing into different objects during this time – how many he cannot be sure – but nothing was quite right. Then came a serendipitous recycling day in Wellington. Coming home after a night on the town, Coubrough noticed a pipe sticking out of a recycling bin on Hanson Street. “It was bright purple and yellow, I think it was a Nerf gun… And I just kind of grabbed it.” Taking the pipe home, inspiration struck – what if he tried blowing into it? What if this unlocked the call of the moa? The next day Coubrough headed to Smith’s place where they recorded some experiments, playing different phrase lengths and tones into the Hanson Street Nerf gun. They then pitched the sound down and applied all-pass filtering, making the sound “more mellow and less plastic-y”.
Once finished, Coubrough was sceptical, he thought it sounded “ridiculous”, but Smith was more optimistic. Smith took it to the next feedback session and, to Coubrough’s surprise, “apparently they just liked it straight away!” The team selected the phrases they liked best and then helped refine the “rhythm” of the call, decisions informed by the calls of living relatives. Overall Smith reflects on the situation as being really fortuitous. “It’s so lucky. Because we could have been blowing on anything – blowing on things for weeks to try and find the sound.” Smith and Coubrough finished their work for the museum in March 2006, with the exhibition launching the following month, guests now able to hear the “haunting lament of extinct species”.
Will we ever know?
The dawn chorus exhibition has since been retired, and much of the extinct bird work from 2006 has been transferred to the newer Te Taiao exhibition, opened in 2019. Te Papa ornithologist Colin Miskelly helped develop Te Taiao, working with sound engineer Piers Gilbertson to recreate the call of the Haast eagle, using a methodology similar to that of Coubrough and Smith. Interestingly, the Te Taiao exhibition brought in a new sensory element, that of smell. At the push of a button, people can now smell their favourite native bird thanks to the work of perfumer Francesco van Eerd. Creating a moa odour was a running joke at the time, Miskelly explains, and a “perfume counter” was even set up at Wellington Airport to promote the exhibition, with the moa fragrance listed as “out of stock”.
Perhaps the moa sounded quite different to the 2006 Nerf gun recording, maybe the recording echoes the call exactly. The truth is, we will likely never know. What can be said, however, is that hearing the call reanimates the long deceased bird in the public imagination, taking moa from bone fragments to sentient creatures who once roamed the forests. So while no whiff of the bird yet exists at Te Papa, the call of the moa still booms within its walls, igniting the auditory senses almost 20 years on.
