Bird on an electric guitar string: Finch song has Barbican aflutter Art and pattern

French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has commissioned a walk-through birdhouse at the Barbican, inhabited by 40 zebra finches and with a landscape of electric guitars. Photograph: Martin Godwin

Music from the behind of one of Britain"s heading unison halls might receptive to advice a hold pointless for the subsequent 3 months, conflicting even. But afterwards the musicians are 40 zebra finches.

The Barbican currently denounced the ultimate art commission, that has seen one of the art studio spaces remade in to a walk-through birdhouse by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. He has strategically placed plugged in electric guitars as perches and cymbals containing H2O and seeds as feeders. As the birds fly around and land on the instruments, or even clean their beaks on the strings, the caller will listen to the amplified results.

Boursier-Mougenot pronounced the designation was partly about questioning the subject of what song is. The artist, a lerned composer, became meddlesome in operative with birds in 1995.

He said: "If you wish to assimilate a quadruped afterwards you have to correlate with it. Here, I am not utilizing the birds, I am collaborating with them." He pronounced the birds were happy in their new birdhouse and carrying fun, he hoped.

It is not the initial time the artist has combined a receptive to advice piece. Previous functions embody him utilizing notice cameras to emanate sounds formed on New York travel hold up and afterwards Harmonichaos 2000-06, an designation of thirteen opening cleaners that have harmonicas trustworthy to their suction nozzles.

The muster arguably puts in to concentration the sundry hold up of a little art studio attendants. The Curve is a prolonged slight space that snakes around the behind of the unison gymnasium – and is utterly apart to it – and has been used as a art studio space given 2006. The last commission was Robert Kusmirowski"s convincing, but dim and depressing, universe fight dual bunker.

The Barbican anticipates that birdwatching will be a rather cheerier wake up for the art studio staff than station in a murky bunker, nonetheless staff will be approaching to feed the finches and transparent up after them.

The birds themselves are professionals. They come from a association that reserve animal actors and will, "unfortunately", pronounced Boursier-Mougenot, go behind to a caged life once this gig is completed.

• Céleste Boursier-Mougenot"s birdhouse will be at the Barbican from twenty-seven Feb until twenty-three May