The bats of Austin's Congress Avenue Bridge and agency Mr. President draft an electronic track

Bacardi and creative agency Mr. President may have missed the apex of bat-related hoopla that occurred with the release of the recent Batman movies, but they still found a pretty excellent way to incorporate bats into music during its showcase at SXSW a few weeks back. Specifically, it enlisted the help of roughly 100,000 chiroteroids in the creation of a short electronic music track.

More specifically, Mr. President used a software app (created by Sochi opening and closing ceremony planners Partizan) that allowed them to "interact with composed sounds" based on the movement of bats. The movements of the colony were then projected onto a grid where each square triggering and affecting specific sounds, beats, pitches and tempos."

The result sounds pretty good, which is either suspect or stands to teach us non-biologists something about bat behavior. A) The sound options were somewhat rigged to make a nice, ambient electronic track. There was never an electric guitar option, so no amount of crazy movement from the test "composers" was going to result in a Dillinger Escape Plan-type track. We can deal with that on Mr. President's part. B) The relative tonality and smoothness of the track is no doubt a reflection of the bats' tightly coordinated air patterns. It's amazing to consider how thousands of organisms can stay in sync while flying at ridiculous speeds.

The colony living under the Congress Bridge in Austin is the largest urban collection of bats in the United States. Although 100,000 was cited as the number appearing in Mr. President's track, there are an estimated 1.5 million residing under the span. Austin has long hosted under-appreciated music, so it makes sense that they grew to appreciate the oft-reviled animals (which eat up to 20,000 pounds of Austin insects a night, thank-you-very-much), and added a viewing deck and a statue of Mexican free-tail bat, the species residing under the bridge.