Bat Embers, Bat Song 15X38 Pastel on paper

Bat Embers, Bat Song uses colors from a thermal image of bats returning to Bracken Cave, Texas, after a night of hunting. Marks above and below the central colored pattern reflect shapes created by bat sonograms, arranged by height to trace the melodic contours and harmony of Rameau's work for keyboard, Le Rappel des Oiseaux, or Bird Song.

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The largest bat colony in the world lives in Bracken Cave Preserve in south central Texas. Every night, 20 million bats exit the mouth of Bracken Cave together, in a spectacular horde. The next morning, however, they return individually in a constant stream. Bat Conservation International streams a wonderful thermal image of their re-entry. The collective heat of their bodies shows up as bright yellow, and the cooler outside air is blue-green. As individual bats return, they swirl in gracefully like embers hovering above red fire.

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Bat Embers, Bat Song is based on the harmonic structure of Rameau's Le Rappel de Oiseaux. I used a 1951 recording of Emil Gilels on piano.

In 2016, the AAAS published a study which indicates that just like birds, bats also sing.

Recently, researchers have discovered that the tunes of some bats are even more complex and similar to bird song than first suspected. These bats' melodies are structured, have multiple syllables, phrases, repeated patterns, and, of course, rhythm. Their songs also have syntax, meaning rules for how the phrases can be combined.

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Bat call pulses from the article Pipistrellus pipistrellus and Pipistrellus pygmaeus in the Iberian Peninsula: An Annotated Segmented Dataset and a Proof of Concept of a Classifier in a Real Environment by Marta Bertran, Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès, and Elena Tena. Published in Applied Sciences in 2019.