http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/aldo-leopold-dawn-chorus/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=wiredscienceclickthru

Audio Time Machine: Aldo Leopold’s Birds, Circa 1940

Close your eyes, open your ears and hear the sounds that greeted famed naturalist Aldo Leopold on a June morning in 1940.

Using his fastidious notes and contemporary birdsong recordings, researchers have recreated a dawn soundscape heard by Leopold outside the rural Wisconsin shack where he wrote A Sand County Almanac, a bible of modern environmentalism.

Leopold habitually arose while it was still dark and took minute-by-minute notes of the dawn chorus, sung by songbirds at the start of each new day. Only toward the end of his life did Leopold realize that the notes had scientific value, but he passed away before they could be published.

“I had read this unpublished manuscript a number of years ago,” said ecologist Stan Temple, a senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. “It struck me that his notes were detailed enough that you could recreate the sound.”

Invited to give the keynote address at a recent workshop on acoustic ecology, an emerging field of research in which soundscapes are used to understand ecosystem health, Temple decided to make his sonic time machine.

more on link, including pleasant dawn chorus reconstruction from Leopold’s notes.

Ta neo. I should play that loud to confuse the birds living in my loft :)

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/pacific-beat/fishing-for-sound-in-the-coral-depths/1013162

Fishing for sound in the coral depths
Updated 10 September 2012, 10:25 AEST

Bernie Krause, a naturalist and musician and has been recording the sounds of healthy coral reefs and reefs that are dying.

During his career Bernie Krause has worked with the Monkees, the Byrds, the Doors, Stevie Wonder and George Harrison but now records the natural world and turns his recordings into musical pieces.

Bernie Krause spoke to Waleed Aly about why he does it and what he has discovered.

Presenter:Waleed Aly

Speaker: Bernie Krause, naturalist and musician

downloadable podcast

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au

wow radio australia. didn’t realise it was still going.

easier to find there than here

http://www.abc.net.au/environment/?type=audio/related&page=4

of course, in consideration, acoustic signals are oft used in animal surveys (to amass species inventories and densities).. such as using 5 minute bird call surveys along a transect, or survey by recording bat calls (decoded using anabat software and hardware), or those of insects or frogs.

Vocal mimics, of course, stuff up bird surveys.

bird surveys should rely on more data than just sound recordings.

roughbarked said:

bird surveys should rely on more data than just sound recordings.

who said that they didn’t?

used to help a frog guy, arthur brooks iirc, do a couple of frog surveys. sitting in a swamp being eaten alive listening to croaks. sort of fun.