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04/20/03 listen 1 listen 2 listen 3 listen 4 listen 5listen 6 listen 7 listen 8 listen 9 listen 10
listen 1 is a 2 minute and 30 second recording of all the birds that were singing for a few minutes. at about 1 minute and 41 seconds it sounds like a bird landed next to my minidisc bag and after a second or two made a loud squawking noise. you can hear so many other birds singing on this recording. for the rest of the recordings i tried to capture some of the individual bird songs. i wanted to go through and pick out different songs and identify each one, but this seems nearly impossible at the beginner bird listener level. i know the song of very few birds and am trying to learn at least the songs and calls of those that are native to chicago and the midwest. a good resource for identifying bird calls is naturesongs.com if anyone wants to give it a go and let me know some of their guesses on some of the birds, feel free. i plan to buy a cd with bird songs and identifiers and learn which birds make which songs. for now, i am very much a novice.
the low, sad song of a mourning dove can be heard in listen 2. i think out of all the bird songs i captured this weekend, this is my favorite.
i think listen 3 is the song sparrow, but it is possible that i am wrong.
i am clueless as to what this one is as well, listen 4, but i like how the two short noises make this bird sound like it is not a very friendly one.
this bird listen 5 has a kind of rhythmic call.
another bird, listen 6, i almost think i know what this one is and then when i go to find a similar one online to make sure i am right, i find out that i am wrong.
listen 7 is, ummm, maybe a bird of some sort.
listen 8 could possibly be a cardinal. i was told that their song sounded like a bird singing "pretty, pretty, cheap, cheap, cheap" i'm thinking maybe this is it, but again, i could be wrong.
listen 9 is also unknown to me. though i think this one may actually be just one part of a bird call, like the end of something else.
listen 10 is another one that i have given up on identifying (for now) unless it is big bird from sesame street.
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Comments
Interesting! I'd like to learn more about bird-songs. Some months ago I read an article studying some properties of bird-songs. One of the things they did was capture (much like you've done) the songs of various birds. Then they timstretched the birdsong while preserving it's pitch, ending up with a much slower sequence of notes. What they found was that the relative pitch between notes resembled very closely bits of human classical music. This suggested that perhaps the birds were copying phrases that they've heard before. Or alternatively, and more interesting, that there might exist some "higher" fundamental order to musical scales leading to the common note sequences in both the songs of birds and classical music. For example, we base "A" on 440Hz and the notes in the "key of A" on the major chormatic scale - both of those are human defined. So besides copying what they've heard there's no reason birds would comply to that definition.
There was another section of the article talking about heart rate (and it's relationship to length of life) and possible reasons for the speed of bird-songs being significantly (but supposively mathmatically) faster than our songs. I'll leave that for later.
Anyway... Sorry for the long ramble. At one time I was going to BLOG this and forgot to (maybe I'll just cut&paste it now). I've finished my latte so I'll end now. :)
Posted by: sEn^ at April 24, 2003 08:26 AM
heh. I can't hear a robin now without having a flashback to that morning last month.
Posted by: j3s at April 25, 2003 04:32 PM
sen: if you run across that article, send me a link please. it sounds very interesting.
i'm just finishing up a really good book that someone recommended to me called, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, by R. Murray Schafer . It talks a lot about acoustic design and about sounds throughout history. He talks a little about birds as well. If you have a chance, I highly recommend it.
Posted by: alicia at April 28, 2003 04:11 PM
alicia, i think you'll dig this: npr story about car alarms
would it make living on a noisy street less annoying?
p.s. you should change the mt settings so people can post html in their comments!
Posted by: steve at April 28, 2003 06:11 PM