ABRADEE | SEARCHING FOR BIRDS ON WIRES | 2026
The Company That Listened to Birds on Wires Again, 10 Years Later / ABRADEE "SEARCHING FOR BIRDS ON WIRES"
Someone read the positions of birds perched on power lines as if they were musical notes. It's an ad for an electric company, but the only stars are utility poles and birds. That's it.
The problem
ABRADEE is an industry association made up of 42 power distribution companies across Brazil, delivering electricity to more than 90 million people, or 99.6% of the population. But their everyday work is mostly invisible to ordinary people. The only thing you can actually see on the street is the network of power lines running along the road — a plain, easy-to-ignore presence that nobody really notices.
The insight
The story starts back in 2009. Art director and musician Jarbas Agnelli was having breakfast one morning when a newspaper photo caught his eye. It showed a flock of birds perched on power lines. What should have been just a scenic photo looked to him like sheet music. From this came "Birds on the Wires," a legendary piece of work that spread around the world almost instantly. What's interesting here is that, 15 years later, a power company brought the same man back to make it again.
The idea
In 2024, Aaron Sutton, CD at Africa Creative, reached out to Agnelli and, with ABRADEE's backing, asked him to expand the technique into a full symphony. Agnelli carefully selected 60 photos from a database of more than 10,000 images plus over 700 new bird photos gathered from nature photographers, translating each one into musical notes to compose "Sinfonia da Energia" (Symphony of Energy). The trick: the arrangement of birds perched on the wires was directly translated into the different parts of an orchestra.
What happened
The symphony premiered performed by a 14-piece orchestra at the ABRADEE Awards ceremony in Brasília, and the following year, in 2025, it was performed again in front of 4,000 spectators at Sendi 2025 in Belo Horizonte. The piece, produced by Africa Creative for ABRADEE, won Gold in the Audio & Radio category at Cannes Lions 2026.
Afterthought
What's nice is that even though the person who took the photo just saw "a photo of birds," only Agnelli saw "music" in it. Power lines can go on being something nobody ever looks at. But the birds that land on them — every once in a while, someone is listening.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2026
