Crakes, objects and sounds August 15, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 5:53 pm The 'Listening to Birds' project has decamped to Brazil for a few months, which partly explains the lack of recent postings. Hopefully there will be more to read over the coming weeks. To kick things off, here are a few thoughts on some tricky birds to see. In certain parts of Europe, a sound that can be heard during the summer months is the dry and repetitive call of a corncrake . This was once a familiar sound but the bird has declined enormously over the past century in the face of agricultural intensification. I've heard corncrakes on many occasions, particularly when I was living on the island of Islay in the west of Scotland, a remaining stronghold for the species. But much to my frustration, I've never seen a corncrake. They're skulking birds that live in grassy fields and dry marshland, where they remain almost constantly invisible and, try as I might, they've never even shown their heads above the tops of the grass when I've been around. I've been hearing crakes recently too. At present I'm at the wonderful Reserva Ecologica de Guapiaçu (REGUA) and there are plenty of crakes on the wetlands near my house. Here they lurk in the extensive beds of rushes, where the chances of seeing them are slender. The strange and sometimes rather un-birdlike calls of different species have been pointed out to me by rangers and other visiting birders: Later, I've been able to compare what I've heard with pre-existing recordings and so was able to confirm that I'd heard the 'right sounds'. But I've never seen any of these crakes and rails, and certainly haven't seen them making the sounds that are attributed to them. For most birds it's eventually possible to see them making sounds, but crakes present an altogether greater challenge, a challenge that raises some important questions about sounds and naming (or more specifically that process of naming normally called 'identification'). Prominent amongst these is the question of the way in which I 'know' I'm hearing a crake. How does one know that a sound is made by a particular bird, if one has never seen the bird making that sound? I suppose in one sense I know that I'm hearing crakes in the same way that I 'know' the Earth is spherical. Like most people I've never seen the Earth as a sphere (although I've seen plenty of images of this of course), but I go along with the conventional understanding of its roundness. But this isn't something I've experienced directly. Perhaps if I had training in astrophysics I would be able to perceive the effects of the Earth's spherical shape all the time, and it's worth remembering that this was the conventional scientific understanding long before anyone had seen the Earth as a whole. But I've never seen the Earth as a whole and nor have I seen a corncrake making that rasping sound. But why all the fuss about seeing? 'Seeing is believing' is the saying, but why is this? It has something to do with what philosophers call ontology, that is the ideas behind what we believe the world to be like. One of the cornerstones of our ontology is the idea that the world is filled with objects and that sounds have their source in these objects. Applying this to the case in question, 'crex crex' is a sound made by an object we call a corncrake. The sound is not the bird, rather it is made by the bird. And conventionally the bird is only apprehended as an object through our seeing it. Perhaps this all seems rather obvious and beyond question, but this might not be the only way to think about sounds, or indeed our experience of the world. What if we were to think of the sound as being the bird, just as much as the feathery thing we conventionally think makes the sound? Such a way of thinking is not so uncommon amongst other peoples, and I suspect it was once more conventional amongst our ancestors, as is reflected in the prominence of onomatopoeic vernacular names. The way we name birds can reflect on how we think about and perceive them. It's much easier to think of a sound as the bird if it has an onomatopoeic name. In fact the name 'crake' is onomatopoeic of the corncrake (which even has an onomatopoeic scientific name: Crex crex), although when applied to the South American crakes it's less helpful. To give a more familiar example, when one 'hears the cuckoo', one is directly perceiving the bird. 'Seeing the cuckoo' makes a bit less sense, until it becomes conventionalised as the name of a family of birds. I've seen several kinds of cuckoo in Brazil, but have not heard a single 'cuckoo'. I think these ontological assumptions also help to explain why birders, like me, are so keen to see birds. It's only through seeing, we assume, that we perceive 'the bird'. Hearing a bird is, in this way of thinking, no different to seeing its nest or its tracks. They are made by the bird, but they are not the bird. I still find it hard to 'unlearn' these assumptions, no matter how I might rationalise them. Anyway, I'm off now to the wetlands to listen to crakes, and perhaps to think of some new names for what I hear. |
| Travels and Telly | So what did I learn?
Travels and Telly 20 June 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 3:28 pm First of all, I'll be popping up on TV this Sunday on BBC1, being interviewed by Michaela Strachan for Countryfile . This is for a feature on bird song and it was recorded last month near Bristol. Last week I visited Finland to attend the NightinGala conference in Järvenpää. The event was quite an interesting mixture of the science and music of bird song. I was also able to enjoy listening to birds in Finland, where to me the birds were a mixture of the familiar, the slightly familiar and the new. Following the recent post about sound identification, I was confronted with some different problems of knowing to those I encountered in America. What I often found was that I was less confident about knowing even bird sounds that seemed familiar because of the different circumstances. Sometimes this was down to the birds singing with noticeably different 'dialects', and this was apparent with Chaffinch (as it usually is), Willow Warbler and Whitethroat . In all these cases, the birds were still easy to recognise but sometimes I was caught out. A Yellowhammer singing an abridged version of its song on the edge of a pine forest in Lapland had me confused for a while before I saw it. I found myself immediately thinking it sounded like a Yellowhammer but that it wasn't quite right, so maybe it could be something else. This 'something else' factor was perhaps the main reason why I had trouble identifying sounds I'm otherwise familiar with. A Song Thrush singing deep in the forests of Lapland had me troubled, even though I 'recognised' it as having the familiar repeated structure. What bothered me was whether there were other birds in the northern forests that might sing in a similar way. I'm not very familiar with the songs of Fieldfare and Redwing, both of which breed in the area, so I felt that I needed to be sure I wasn't hearing a variant of one of those species of thrush (and I was later to learn that there are a lot of variants in Redwing song!). In all these cases I was eventually able to be pretty confident of what bird was making the sound, but the problem was that I was unfamiliar with the context. In Britain, I can be much more certain of what I'm hearing because I'm also familiar with the other sounds I'm likely to hear in most places. In Finland I'm aware that there are birds that make sounds I don't know, and maybe some of them sound like birds that I think know. What all this suggests is that 'knowing' a sound is made by a particular kind of bird is a very contingent knowing. Knowing a Song Thrush in your neighbourhood is one kind of knowing, but knowing it everywhere is another. If I'd have stayed in Finland a little bit longer, I might have had the opportunity to travel over to the Russian border to hear the extraordinary sound of Europe's first Swinhoe's Snipe .
So what did I learn? 05 June 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 3:53 pm Previously I've written about techniques for learning bird sounds from recordings and how these can be used when preparing for visits to places where the birds are unfamiliar. Well, now I've been to America and heard and seen lots of birds there, so how did I get on with using these methods? Not surprisingly, the results were mixed and I wasn't always able to identify every sound that I heard. However, there were plenty of occasions when I heard new birds and was fairly confidently able to figure out what they were. Below I outline some of the problems and some of the successes. Successes: The first birding I did in America was in Central Park, New York and I was pleased that I was able to recognise the thrush-like song of American Robin , with its distinctive alternating phrases. The contextual cue of seeing lots of Robins was obviously helpful in getting me to this conclusion too. Warblers were the biggest task I faced because there are so many different species (I saw 25 in all) and their songs are often rather similar. Two species that I was able to identify before seeing them were Kentucky Warbler and Blue-winged Warbler. Kentucky Warbler has a simple song consisting of a two-note phrase repeated several times. I remembered this with the mnemonic phrase 'Fry it, fry it, fry it' (as said by someone working in KFC I guess!), and this certainly helped me to pick up on the pattern, quality and cadence of the song, which is subtly different to some other warblers, such as Ovenbird . Ovenbird sounds more galloping (it's almost like it's saying 'giddy up') and less 'liquid' than Kentucky Warbler. Blue-winged Warbler has a fairly distinctive two note song that sounds like someone sighing or even snoring. I imagined someone in blue and yellow (the main colours of this species) snoozing away when I heard this recording. It took just a brief snatch of song to get me onto the only Blue-winged Warbler I saw. I didn't have to summon up the visualisation, I more-or-less instantly knew what it was. A group of birds where I hoped a knowledge of the songs would prove particularly useful are Empidomax flycatchers. This is a genus where every species looks extremely similar but where the songs and calls differ more noticeably. I saw quite a few, but unfortunately a lot of these remained silent. However, I was able on a couple of occasions to confidently identify Acadian Flycatcher from its bright, two-note upward inflected song. In this case, to identify the song I first of all needed to know I was looking at an Empidomax and I also checked my own recording against others that I had, just to be sure. I was still pretty confident in the field though. There were quite a few other occasions when I knew songs without necessarily having to see the bird. The pure tones of an Eastern Wood-pewee and the beautiful lilting song of a Wood Thrush were both very distinctive and when I heard dry rattling songs, I knew, at least when I took context into account, that I was hearing Chipping Sparrow , Worm-eating Warbler or Pine Warbler. Problems: The biggest problem was actually finding the time to learn the songs beforehand. Figuring out the playlists is a big part of the process, and is in itself integral to the learning process as well as being a practicality. As Stephenson mentions in his article, learning the sounds through testing has to be taken in small, easy steps so ideally it would be best to start learning a few months in advance and to do a little bit each day. My work schedule tended to mean I had to do it in more concentrated spells, which worked less well. Many of the problems I encountered can at least partially be explained by a straightforward lack of preparation. But, why couldn't I identify all of the sounds I heard? Here are a few reasons. Only learning songs: Almost all of the sounds I tried to learn were songs rather than calls. This was partly for simplicity's sake. Learning all the various sounds that most species make would be a very hard task and, as it was spring, I thought a lot of what I heard would be singing. To some extent this was true, but, as I expected, there were lots of other sounds too and I struggled with those. Some I could pick up easily like the Robin-like 'tick' of a Northern Cardinal or the 'chickadeedeedee' of the various Chickadee species. Others were confusingly obscure or very similar to one another. Differences between recordings and the real thing: This is another problem that was perhaps not surprising. Many songbirds have local 'dialects' and other sorts of variations in their songs, which meant that the song I'd learnt from a recording was sometimes significantly different to the songs of the same species I encountered in the field. This was particularly apparent with Eastern Towhee and Song Sparrow . Of course, part of the skill of learning bird sounds is to be able to recognise the style and pattern of a bird so that variations can still be recognised. That level of skill takes time to acquire though. Developing the skill of visualisation: Stephenson advocates visualisation to remember sounds. I found this quite tricky and visualisation as a memory technique is not an activity that I found came easily to me. I find it more straightforward to remember words, or perhaps more accurately phrases or even stories. Some of my visualisations worked but I don't think I ever found the visualisation being 'triggered' by hearing the sound in the field. Rather, the visualisations and the stories were useful for becoming familiar with the characteristics of the sound but it was hard to instantaneously relate the sound back to the visualisation when I heard the sound 'for real'. The mnemonic techniques worked well within the narrow context of testing but they were less effective in the much more open circumstances of the field, when I could be hearing all kinds of sound. Only learning the context of the playlist: This brings me on to the final problem of both learning the context and learning within a context. Recognition of anything is contextual. If I had heard a familiar British bird in America, I would probably have been momentarily confused because I wouldn't have been expecting to hear it and would probably have assumed it was an American species that made similar sounds. Admittedly, I didn't have these difficulties with the numerous House Sparrows I encountered but I knew from guide books that I would be hearing them. But as well as needing to learn the context so that we might anticipate what we encounter, we learn within a context and listening to a playlist, even one that is played randomly, is a different context to the field. The playlist is limited and closed and this means that it only presents certain possibilities. The field is open to manifold possibilities, even if some are more possible than others. These different contexts of listening present different challenges and learning a song within the context of the playlist test is usually more straightforward than knowing what it is in the field. For a start the playlist is based around certain characteristics, e.g. descending songs, so the listener doesn't have to take so much notice of that characteristic when listening because it's already a given. The fields where we listen to real birds are vastly more complex and open-ended, although this complexity does at least provide for a lot more clues. As I mentioned earlier, all of these problems can be countered to an extent by learning over a longer period, becoming more skilled at mnemonics, and by developing more refined techniques. The problem of the limited context of the playlist could, for example, be countered by placing birds on a range of playlists (e.g. habitat or area based ones) and also by testing yourself against all of the recordings in your collection, rather than just within a short playlist. This process raises a number of questions about the stages of learning and what is it to 'know' a sound. In most parts of Britain, I think I know the sounds of birds very well. I don't often encounter sounds that I can't put a name to and in many cases I can 'hear' the sounds of a species in my head on demand. If I think of a Robin singing, I can hear pretty accurately what it sounds like in my 'mind's ear'. In America, I didn't know the sounds as well as that. If I 'knew' a sound it was a less confident kind of knowing. In many of the successful examples I describe above, I still felt that I needed to see the bird to be sure I was hearing what I thought I was. I also found that there were some sounds I knew one day but had forgotten by the next. In only a few cases can I replay the song in my head. In most cases, I only know songs in a contingent way: I know them when I hear them. But ultimately, any kind of knowing is somewhat contingent on circumstances and learning through recordings does not mean that the sounds of the birds are 'known' but that one knows what to listen for. |
| Screaming summer | How to learn bird sounds at home
Screaming summer May 7, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 4:44 pm Swifts are back, at least here in Aberdeen. They arrived, rather suddenly as they often do, on Monday and have been gathering and swirling above the city roof tops ever since. If I'm pushed I usually claim that swifts are my favourite birds, although dippers have a strong case too. Part of the reason why I think they're so wonderful is that incredible screeching noise they make , a sound that seems so redolent of warm summer days. The arrival of swifts is perhaps the bird arrival that I look forward to the most, and come late summer I shall be keenly looking to see how long they stay on for. Many people wrote to me about swifts and their associations. Andrew from Crowborough said:
I've listened to different birds since I was a child. The one I always listen out for is swifts. They don't make a nice sound but I always associate their arrival with the beginning of summer.
Judith from Huntingdon adds:
Whenever I hear the sound of swifts screaming above during the summer, I am transported back to the garden of the house in which I was brought up in Southport, Lancashire
Melissa from London shares my enthusiasm:
The bird song I love the best is the scream of the swift, because of its associations with summer. I always watch out for them, and this year I heard them before I saw them, on my way in to work one day. It was a heart-lifting moment. In central London you do see them flying overhead, but usually very far up and not very audible. I love going away in summer, to Devon or the Lake District, somewhere where they scream and dive almost around your head. They stay such a short time, the beeping cries of the house martins lingering a bit longer.
And Philip from Preston has similar feelings:
The screaming of parties of swifts swooping down between the house tops is perhaps my favourite bird sound (it's hardly a song!). Coupled with the spectacle of their flight, it is so exciting it makes me want to yelp with joy! And of course it tells us that spring will soon be summer or indeed that summer is already here (but not for long - the swifts stay for such a short time). May they always return - the thought of summer without them is unbearable.
I think this last quote suggests one of the reasons why swifts are so strongly associated with summer. Their presence so closely coincides with that season, arriving in early May and leaving in early to mid August. Like a typically British summer they're brief and ephemeral but, with their needle-winged flight and screaming cries, full of effervescent life.
How to learn bird sounds at home May 5, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 11:50 am Learning new bird sounds is difficult for most people, and I don't regard myself as any better than anyone else despite having been birding for most of my life. I was interested, then, to read the article by Tom Stephenson on Surfbirds about techniques he's developed to learn bird sounds prior to going on foreign trips. I often find that when I go abroad I can learn to identify birds visually quite rapidly, particularly if I've leafed through the field guides beforehand. But learning sounds takes much longer. I can normally pick up a few each day but it's a struggle and I end up spending much of the trip bewildered by an array of unfamiliar new sounds. Soon I'm going to be spending a short time in North America and there are other trips abroad scheduled for later in the year, so I was keen to try out these techniques to see if they would help me learn at least some of the songs and calls before I go away. North America is a good place to start because I know a lot of the birds visually but don't know the songs of many species (I've mainly been to America in autumn and winter previously). Also, although it's very good for birds, it doesn't have huge numbers of species, so the list of sounds to learn is shorter than it would be for the tropics. The technique has a number of stages. The first is to gather together the recordings you need, which involves working out what species are likely where you are going as well as downloading, and possibly editing, the recordings. Next you need to make up various playlists of 5-10 species where the calls or songs have similar qualities. This is where the learning really starts and I found it quite a challenge to come up with these. What qualities do you select for the playlists? Pitch (high or low, ascending, descending, staying the same)? Repetition (the same phrase over and over, repetition then variation as with a song thrush)? The number of notes in the song (two, three or four note)? The pattern of sound (rambling and continuous, regular pauses)? The quality of the sound (buzzy, rattling, 'electrical', shrill)? Of course a lot of sounds have more than one of these qualities, which complicates things a bit, but trying to figure out the playlists is useful because it requires that you listen actively and systematically to the recordings. I've used pretty much all of the above qualities in making playlists, but I still think I need to work on it more, especially with the many rather similar high-pitched songs of birds like warblers. The next stage is to come up with mnemonics that help you to link the sound to the bird. Sometimes this is relatively easy, for example when the name is onomatopoeic, but Stephenson recommends coming up with ways of linking sound and name through visualisation. The visualisation should ideally link name, sound and the appearance of the bird. For example, least flycatcher, a small American songbird, has a song that sounds a bit like it's saying 'titchy', which links rather straightforwardly to its name and its small size. I imagine a small person saying 'titchy' when I hear the sound. The final part of the technique involves repeatedly testing yourself on each playlist by using the random play function of your media player. This is an aspect of the technique that technology has really helped to facilitate. What's important here is that the random element enables the mnemonic techniques to be tested actively. This active approach to remembering runs through the whole process and I think this is helpful for learning and remembering in general. Passive learning, whilst it sometimes seems popular in our nation's schools, is rarely the most effective way of developing skills. The technique also highlights the relationship between hearing and seeing, because it's through visualisation that the sounds are remembered. One of the important aspects of visualisation is that it tends to be much more instantaneous than the way we remember sounds. For example, when I hear the beginning of a song I often have to 'play it through' in my mind to try to remember what it is. Visualisation is, hopefully, much quicker. I'll update on my progress after I've been to America. |
An exhaltation of larks March 22, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 12:34 pm Last weekend I was fortunate enough to spend some time in the beautiful and bird-rich northeast of Spain. There were plenty of birds singing in the various habitats I visited, and I had an interesting time trying to recognise the various sounds. Some of these were familiar from home, others were sounds I've heard on previous visits to continental Europe but which I don't hear regularly. I was interested to discover which of these I could remember. Some were very obvious, such as the simple and insistent 'sip-sip-sip' of a zitting cisticola (or fan-tailed warbler, if you prefer). There were other sounds that were a bit harder to recall but which I recognised once I heard them, like the harsh ratchet-like call of a Sardinian warbler and the distinctive buzzy twittering of a serin, a sound that seems so redolent of warm sunny gardens in southern Europe. But the finest spectacle of sound was in the drylands at El Planeron, just to the east of Zaragoza. Early morning here was cool with a lingering mist and the air was filled with singing larks, particularly the numerous lesser short-toed larks, together with thekla and calandra larks. Whenever I'm in open country like this, it strikes me that the way that birds sing is different to how they sing in more enclosed habitats such as woodland. Here the birds don't find a discrete perch to sing from but instead they take to the air and their singing is a continuous stream of sound and not the well-mannered bursts and pauses of woodland birds. Here's part of a recording I made at El Planeron. Interspersed amongst the relentless twittering of lesser short-toed larks is a rather different sound: a rising three-note song where the last note is strangely inflected. This is the song of the avian speciality of El Planeron, a Dupont's lark. This is one of those birds that is perhaps most readily encountered as a sound. They sing much more from the ground than other larks and they are, as anyone who has ever tried to look for them will tell you, bewilderingly hard to catch sight of. You can hear one rather more clearly on this recording. Eventually I saw one rise up from the ground like the other larks and give a circling song flight high up above me. But when I think of a Dupont's lark, what I think of is that strange three-note phrase that I heard almost continuously at El Planeron, emerging from what seemed like the landscape itself. |
| Listening to Birds on ASR tomorrow | Life in Mono | Auditory illusions | Birdwatching and Heard Listing | Caerlaverock | Why bird sounds?
Listening to Birds on ASR tomorrow February 28, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 11:31 am The Listening to Birds project will be featured on Fiona-Jane Brown's show on Aberdeen Student Radio tomorrow morning between 11 and 12. I'll be playing folk music about birds as well as talking about the project.
Life in Mono February 22, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 12:32 pm A few days ago I read this very revealing and intelligent article by Nick Coleman , a music critic who recently lost his sense of hearing in one ear. This left him with a very different and rather disorienting sense of the sounds that he heard. Although Coleman is mostly talking about how he hears human music, there are a few points that he makes that I think have relevance to how we listen to birds. Coleman describes how, previous to his loss of hearing, music was for him 'architectural'. That is, he experienced music much as he would experience being inside a building. I suppose this is true for a great many people; I know that when I listen to music I can easily imagine being in certain sorts of place, particularly when I close my eyes. Unlike Coleman, these places are not always buildings, but I still feel immersed in the world as the music surrounds me. Coleman's once architectural sense of music was detailed and rich, but since his impairment he only hears music as two-dimensional and flat, like an architectural drawing rather than a building. What's more significant is that he now feels no emotion when listening to music. What was once his way of 'containing and then examining emotion' is now bereft of feeling. There are clearly many benefits to having two ears (and also for that matter two eyes) and the sense of depth that the two different sources of information provide is critical, something explained by Gregory Bateson in his magnificent book Mind and Nature . But what's at first surprising is that this loss of depth, the loss of his architectural sense of music, also caused Coleman to lose any sense of emotion or feeling in music. Interestingly, the only occasion since his loss in which music has provoked emotion in Coleman was when he watched the memorial service from the Cenotaph on TV. But when he listened to some of the music played at the service on his stereo it was an awful, flat noise once again. Perhaps his response to the service was different because he could see what was taking place and because of his memories of previous services, as Oliver Sacks speculates. Imagination and the familiarity of context provided the depth that was missing through hearing. What I take from Coleman's story is the way that music, and perhaps sound more generally, provide us with a feeling of being in the world. And what's more, the 'high order' properties of music tend to heighten those feelings. This, then, has some relevance to why the sound of birds can affect us so much. Hearing birds singing can both heighten our experience of being in the world, and of being somewhere specific. It can also transport us through memory and imagination to other places, times and feelings. Coleman ends by commenting that he is gradually adapting to the limitations of his hearing. Just as 'being in the world' is something we learn to do, it seems that the sense of being that comes through hearing develops and adapts with us.
Auditory illusions February 14, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 12:35 pm Tuesday was a beautiful late winter's day here in Aberdeen - sunny and quite mild. Quite a few birds were singing and calling and as I walked home through an area of old buildings and warehouses I briefly heard a sound that stopped me in my tracks. It was a drawn out trilling sound, perhaps followed by a few scratchy notes, although it was hard to be certain of this above the noise of the traffic. My immediate reaction was that this was something different, a sound that was not one I normally hear about the city. My next reaction was that it sounded rather like the song of a lesser whitethroat - a sound I know rather well, but one that I would never expect to hear in such a context. The idea that a lesser whitethroat, which is a summer visitor and scarce in Aberdeen at the best of times, would be singing from (it seemed) a rooftop in the middle of February was so implausible that I cast that aside as a possibility. I then remembered that the song of a black redstart is rather reminiscent of a lesser whitethroat. I'm less familiar with this song but I've heard it plenty of times on visits to continental Europe where the bird is common. In the circumstances, black redstart seemed more likely, although still unusual; it's more likely to appear during the winter and they're quite commonly found in built-up, urban areas. I was willing to entertain the possibility but was that really what I'd heard? It was clear to me that I needed to hear the sound one more time to be sure of what I was hearing but I waited for a few minutes for the bird to sing again and heard nothing resembling the sound that had made me stop and listen. There were other birds calling, including a few greenfinches which give a few trilling calls but of a rather different quality to a black redstart. Perhaps I'd misheard a greenfinch though. I began to wonder what it was that I hadn't heard clearly and needed to assess again. Certainly I'd heard the trill - the pattern of the sound - quite clearly. But what about the quality of the sound, the timbre? A black redstart and a greenfinch trill are very different in quality but less so in pattern. Perhaps it was this quality that made it seem different, but I couldn't be sure from that one brief burst of sound. So I needed another listen to check the quality of the sound and to do this I needed to be listening properly and giving the sound my full attention. That first time I'd heard it, I'd been listening in an open way rather than focussing on a particular sound. This had only served to draw my attention to something that sounded different, or out of place. The second burst was needed for verification or at least for confirmation that I really was hearing something out of the ordinary. It's rather like a sequence from a horror film: sound (maybe a snap from a breaking twig or a creaking floorboard) - question (what was that?) - repeat of first sound - confirmation of what the sound is - reaction (run or scream!). There was no second sound though and yesterday morning I returned to the same area and heard nothing more, although the greenfinches were still there. I suspect I shall be listening a little more attentively as I pass through this area, at least for the next few days. I've now begun to wonder what I heard. From such a brief experience I'm struggling to have any kind of memory of what the sound was really like. Perhaps the sound that I now recall is actually one of the recordings of black redstart that I've listened back to. It's sometimes said that there are no 'auditory illusions', only optical illusions. The light does indeed play tricks. But does sound do that too? Certainly sound can be distorted, but I think what's more significant is the way that we listen to sound and how we go about identifying what it is that we're hearing. What sort of process do we need to go through in order be sure of what we're hearing? Birders hear and see lots of 'possibles and probables' and doubtless forget about most of them in due course. Most of these fail to become 'definites' because of some sort of problem in perception; that second call or prolonged close view that would turn possible into probable and probable into definite never happens. But I think these tantalising episodes are potentially more significant in revealing the processes of perception than any stonewall certainty, satisfying though certainty is.
Birdwatching and heard listing February 12, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 10:30 am I'm a birder, or should that be birdwatcher? Lots of people are interested in watching and listening to birds but quite where a casual interest turns into birding is hard to say. I'd define a birder as someone who regularly participates in activities that have a clear focus on encountering birds. Birders don't just go out and notice the birds around them while they're doing something else, they go out specifically to see and hear birds. I say 'see and hear' but I would say that for most birders the aim is to watch birds rather than to listen to them. This is not to say that birders aren't interested in hearing birds. On the contrary, hearing birds is very significant but this is usually as a means to an end. Whilst people go birding for lots of reasons, I think most birders have two particular goals in mind in pursuing their pastime; they want to see birds and they want to know what kind of birds they are seeing. The sounds a bird makes are often extremely useful for revealing the location of birds, particularly when they're in thick cover or flying overhead, and so attending to calls helps birders to see the bird. They can also assist in identifying a bird, most obviously in distinguishing similar looking species or recognising birds that have only been seen poorly. But although birders often enjoy hearing birds, I think listening for calls and songs is often seen by them as a means to those two ends of seeing and identifying. Birders are, by reputation, rather keen on keeping lists of the birds they encounter and they often maintain a whole variety of these. There are life lists for all the birds they've ever recorded, national lists, year lists for species recorded in a calendar year, local patch lists, day lists etc. I'm not that much of a lister myself, although I do keep a few. But like a lot of birders I make an important distinction for the purposes of listing between birds that I hear and birds that I see. On some lists, particularly the very important life list and British list, I only count a bird if I've seen it. Although there are plenty of exceptions, I would say that this attitude is the norm amongst birders. This thread on Birdforum gives a good indication of how a lot of birders approach the question of whether to 'tick' birds (that is, include it on their lists) that they only hear. For many, a bird clearly seems more real to them once they've seen it and hearing a bird without seeing it seems like a disappointment, particularly if it's a species that isn't on their list. I must confess that whilst I can't readily explain why seeing a bird makes it seem more real, I still find it hard to get past the desire to see a bird. On hearing a bird, particularly one that I 'need' for a list, my first reaction is always to try and see it. Hearing it is a means to this end only, albeit a rather affecting means. To redress this emphasis on seeing I've decided to take up 'heard listing' and I encourage other birders to do the same. Fairly obviously, I can only count species on my heard list if I've heard them utter a sound. So how am I doing? Well, my 'British List' of species that I've seen in Britain stands at a fairly lowly 311. I can only think of two species that I've heard in Britain but never seen, those elusive birds Quail and Corncrake. But how many have I seen but never heard? It turns out to be a great many more. Of course this raises the question of what counts as a sound. Do ducks splashing into the water count? Perhaps not, although again this is rather arbitrary, but vocalisations and mechanical sounds made by the bird certainly do. I've heard most of the passerine (songbird) species that I've seen, aside from a handful of rare vagrants that I've only rarely encountered. The gaps become much more apparent amongst the waterbirds, seabirds and birds of prey. A glance through the Collins Guide (the leading field identification guide to European birds) reveals that many diving duck are 'rather silent' and indeed there are a lot that I can't recall ever hearing. I see red-breasted merganser on an almost daily basis but can't say that I've ever heard the weak display call of the male or the “repeated hard, grating 'prrak prrak prrak'” of the female. What's most striking is that I'm often unsure as to whether I've heard a species or not, a situation unlikely to arise with seeing birds. Have I ever heard a glaucous gull? Possibly not. The one I regularly see from my bedroom in Aberdeen harbour seems to keep pretty quiet, but I'll be casting my ear in its direction in an attempt to get it on my heard list. Birding is an activity and like any activity it is a particularly way of encountering our world and the other lifeforms within it. Through birding I've learnt to perceive in a particular way and to attach significance to certain elements of what I encounter. Unlike the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, whom Steven Feld has written so eloquently about, I don't apprehend birds initially as sounds or 'voices in the forest', as they put it. Instead I've learnt to understand birds as things that make sounds. I'm not sure that heard listing will change this understanding, particularly because unlike the Kaluli I'll be trying to hear birds that are much more readily seen than heard, but it may help to make me listen a little more attentively.
Caerlaverock February 4, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 5:12 pm I spent the final weekend of January on a field trip run by the Wildlife Sound Recording Society at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Caerlaverock in Dumfriesshire. I stayed in the hostel at the reserve itself and so was able to get out at all times of the day to make recordings. Recording wasn't always easy because there were high winds on Friday and Saturday, which made it difficult to get a clean recording. Sunday and Monday morning were better, and I was also aided in my efforts by my growing familiarity with the site and the daily rhythms of the birds. The weekend also helped me to learn more about the recording equipment I was using: a Fostex FR2-LE recorder and a Sennheiser ME66 microphone. In particular, I got used to setting the gain to an appropriate level - high enough to pick up the detail but not so high as to create distortion and increase noise. I also became accustomed to listening through headphones, which is useful for monitoring what's being recorded. Caerlaverock is a noisy place in January, with large numbers of wildfowl and waders using the area. By the end of the weekend I'd decided that the best approach was to set the recording equipment up in a small hide and let it run, capturing the various sounds of the marshes. The best time of day to record was just before sunrise until just after, when the birds were waking up but before the human visitors had arrived. I tried this on Sunday, but the wind was a bit strong and the flocks of geese were distant. On Monday I got things right, recording from a different hide that was out of the wind and with the geese coming into land just fifty or so metres away. One of the contentions of the project is that bird sounds are evocative of time, place and season and through these recordings I'd like to evoke something of that weekend at Caerlaverock. Of course most people reading this won't have been to the reserve but perhaps the sounds will still draw out some recollections of other places for you. The first recordings were those I made on the Monday morning. It was still dark at first and few birds could be discerned by sight. This is the recording I added to my previous post and on it you can hear oystercatchers, teal, mallard, curlew and wigeon. I think there's a common snipe in there too. There are only a small number of barnacle geese at this stage of the morning. After about twenty minutes, the first flocks of barnacle geese start to arrive in from the east and can be dimly seen against the slowly brightening sky. Here you can hear two flocks arriving in, and more followed a few minutes later. Eventually there are several thousand geese settled within a short distance. Late risers appear, including a flock of rooks and a few whooper swans bugling away, their calls almost drowned out amongst the geese. The whooper swans are easier to hear on this recording, which was made at around 11am on the Sunday. They gather on one of the pools every morning where they're fed grain by the reserve staff. You can hear them here too, but there's less of their excitable clamour and you can also pick out the soft, insistent notes of teal and a few mallards. This was recorded on Saturday morning, when the wind was still quite gusty. You may notice occasional buffeting on the recording. Nearby, lots of smaller birds gather in the trees and hedgerows around the visitor centre, many of them feeding on the grain put out for the wildfowl. You can hear blue tit, robin, blackbird, wren and yellowhammer with the sounds of the swans in the background reminding you that you're close to water. As the day draws on, the barnacle geese are more settled and are busy feeding on grass. On this recording you can hear a flock feeding. Some birds are giving loud yapping calls but there's a steady murmur of quieter 'conversational calls' arising from the flock. And, although it's still January, the mild weather encourages a few birds to start singing. This chaffinch sounds like it's just practicing in readiness for the spring (recorded with Remembird). So what do these sounds evoke and how do they achieve this? For me of course they take me right back to last weekend and being there making the recordings. They also stir up a few memories, usually a bit less precise, of other places where I've heard the same calls. I'm also reminded of other occasions when I was up before dawn and heard the birds waking around me. The power of the sounds always seems to be enhanced by the darkness, when the movements of the birds, and their very presence can only be traced by ear. Of course here we're listening to recordings and not real birds. What you're hearing is not quite like being there and listening yourself, not least because the recordings are in mono and not in stereo. But I think that recordings of sound are still more evocative than images (either still or moving). To me at least, a reasonable sound recording comes much closer to the experience of hearing than a photograph does to seeing. On listening to a recording, I can place myself into that situation. With a picture I feel far more detached from what I'm viewing, even if I took the photograph myself. For the wildlife sound recordist, the aim is often to produce a recording that approximates to a real experience of listening. There's also a desire to keep out 'extraneous' sounds, particularly human or mechanical noises such as traffic or planes. There were no problems with traffic at Caerlaverock but planes were almost continually flying over and you may have heard some on the above recordings. This recording here perhaps has the noisiest plane, although how loudly you can hear it will depend on what you're using to playback. Ordinarily I don't notice the sound of planes but making recordings certainly brings them to one's attention. I could hear the planes rather loudly through the headphones at the time and on playing back the recordings they can still seem rather intrusive. This reminds me that a recorder and microphone doesn't hear in quite the same way that we do. When we hear, we can filter out some sounds and focus in on others. This is a skill that we learn and it means that if we're listening for birds that's mostly what we hear and not those extraneous noises that the microphone picks up on. Some recorders have built in filters for low frequency sounds such as traffic and the use of sound editing software enables the recording to be filtered afterwards. But sophisticated though these are, they are unable to reproduce the subtleties and intelligence of listening that humans, and presumably other animals, acquire through their lives. Thanks to the Wildlife Sound Recording Society and Caerlaverock WWT for a wonderful weekend.
Why bird sounds? February 1, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 12:19 pm A couple of days ago I read this interesting report about how scientists have discovered that certain sounds made by Anna's hummingbirds are produced mechanically by the tail feathers rather than being vocalisations. This reminded me to explain why the Listening to Birds project is about bird sounds in the broadest possible sense. Perhaps when I mention 'listening to birds' people at first think of bird song or more broadly bird vocalisations. But birds make lots of beautiful, startling and evocative sounds that aren't produced through the syrinx, the specialised organ they use to produce songs and calls. Perhaps the most obvious example of these 'other sounds' is the drumming of a woodpecker. But there are others. As birds move through the air the wings rush and whir. And birds make all kinds of other sounds as they interact with their physical surroundings, sounds like the gushing of a duck or swan as it lands on the water. I made the following recording last weekend at Caerlaverock Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve in the south of Scotland. The recording was made just after 7am, a short time before sunrise. I was hearing lots of vocalisations from ducks, geese and waders but some of my favourite sounds were the whirring of wings or the splashing of ducks landing in the water. I love the feeling of the movement of birds that these sounds evoke. So this is a project that is concerned with every kind of sound that a bird makes and I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences of these 'other birds sounds' through the contribute section of the website. |
| The sound microscope and the whippoorwill effect | The sound of spring
The sound microscope and the whippoorwill effect January 16, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 6:16 pm Recently I was sent a CD released by Smithsonian Folkways called The Birds World of Song: Listening through a Sound Microscope to Birds around a Maryland Farmhouse. The CD was first released in 1961 and made by Hudson and Sandra Ansley. It's a fascinating listen and you can hear brief samples and purchase the CD here. So what is a 'sound microscope' and what sort of effects does using one have on how we hear birds? According to the sleeve notes by Hudson Ansley,
A two speed tape recorder is a sound microscope. By recording at high speed and playing back at half speed, the effect is to magnify the song, or extend it over twice the length of tape.
The microscope magnifies not in size or volume but in time. By slowing down the recordings more detail can be discerned by human ears. The Ansleys used this technique to write bird song in musical notation and to compare different songs in more detail than would be possible with recordings made at a normal speed. Perhaps most significantly, they used the sound microscope to try to understand how birds sound to each other. Could birds hear the detail that the sound microscope revealed? The first two tracks on the record consist of recordings made in March and June, with most of the songs slowed down. The sounds are strangely disorienting at first, and are rather reminiscent of the whistles of the Clangers, for those that remember them. These are followed by four tracks of analysis by Hudson Ansley, in which the elements of each song are examined and compared with others. He argues that we are unable to take in the bursts of sound in bird song because our cochlea is different to a bird's. “The twitter we hear as bird song is sheer distortion,” he claims, but by slowing down the sound we are better able to deal with the complexity of sound that reaches our ears. The final track, 'Mockingbird', introduces a discussion of how birds hear other birds. Northern mockingbirds are able to mimic all the other birds in the area with great accuracy. One of these local birds is the whippoorwill , whose song sounds to us rather like its three-note onomatapoeic name. But when the song of the whippoorwill is slowed down, it becomes clear that the song consists of five rather than three notes. So how many notes does the mockingbird sing when it mimics a whippoorwill? As the sound microscope reveals, the mockingbird sings five notes too. Ansley argues that this shows that the mockingbird hears the notes that we are unable to discern - what Ansley terms 'the whippoorwill effect'. The sound microscope thus furnishes us with an experience of sound akin to a bird's. In listening to this recording, I'm reminded of the artist Marcus Coates ' piece 'Dawn Chorus', in which recordings of birds are slowed down to a speed that humans can more readily imitate. He then asked singers to sing these slowed down versions and then speeded them back up so that they sounded like the original bird. You can see an example of this here , where there's also a clip of the slow singing. Coates is interested in human-animal relations and in 'Dawn Chorus' he encourages us to think about these relations and about what it is to be human. This harks back to Hudson Ansley's sleeve notes to The Bird's World of Song in which he argues,
We decline to hew to a line that separates man from other animals, nor do we see any reason to draw a qualitative distinction between bird song and man-made music.
I made my own 'sound microscope' using the free sound editing programme Audacity and used it to listen to some crossbills I recorded last week. The first recording is at normal speed and includes one crossbill giving an excitement call (the low churping that sounds a bit like a blackbird) and another singing (including the repeated 'tee-chur' phrase that sounds like, and probably is, mimicry of a great tit). The second recording is the same recording slowed down to -75%. The great tit mimicry now sounds rather like a cuckoo. The work of both Coates and the Ansleys suggests that our experience of life is not totally contrasting with birds but is somewhat slower. Thanks to Julian for sending me the CD.
The sound of spring January 14, 2008 Andrew Whitehouse @ 3:49 pm First of all, a happy New Year to all readers. It should be a very busy 2008 on the Listening to Birds project. We're still enveloped in the depths of winter here in the northeast of Scotland but the days are beginning to draw out and the first signs, and sounds, of spring are in the air. Over Christmastime I was down in the rather mild English Midlands and the relatively warm weather was encouraging a few birds to sing. During the autumn and early winter the only birds I'd heard singing here in Aberdeen were robins and wrens but down south goldcrests , mistle thrushes and dunnocks were also tempted into song. But it's not just the sound of birds singing that marks the coming of spring. Once or twice, even in the grip of some fierce winter storms, I've heard the brief burst of an oystercatcher over town. We see them along the coast here all winter, but as spring gets closer they start prospecting nest sites further inland and can be heard overhead, often at night-time. And for some time now the herring gulls that nest on the rooves below my flat have been returning to their nest sites periodically and calling to one another with that familiar seaside cry. I look forward to being regularly awoken as the days lengthen. Here's one I recorded last week, with the thrum of Aberdeen harbour in the background. Some birds just seem to sound summery whatever the season. Here's a flock of goldfinches I recored twittering above the traffic in Torry in December. The lightness of their call somehow seems to evoke a feeling of sunny days and flower-filled meadows, even when the surroundings are anything but. Hearing these sounds appear as the birds' lives journey through their annual cycle is to me less about phenology, the scientific study of these first appearances, and more about the feeling those sounds give of life progressing, both for birds and for humans. If you'd like to tell me about your own sounds of spring then you can post your experience through the contribute section of the website. |
