Subject: [Tweeters] Bird Sound frequency in Hertz
Date: Oct 26 09:19:36 2012
From: Marc Hoffman - tweeters at dartfrogmedia.com


Speaking of viewing sound waves as spectrograms, Syrinx
(http://www.syrinxpc.com/) is an excellent free software program for
viewing and editing sound waves. The link above is for PC, but I
believe a Mac version is available. With this program, you could look
at the spectrogram for any sound file (typically bird calls are
encoded as MP3's) to immediately grasp the balance of upper, mid, and
lower frequencies and how they change dynamically. This is often more
useful than the more typical sound-wave view that shows only the
changes in volume but not the balance of frequencies.

Here is an image comparing a traditional wave display with a spectrogram:
http://www.wilhelm-kurz-software.de/dynaplot/applicationnotes/spectrogram1.gif

Here's an online article about identifying bird calls and
specifically how to use a spectrogram to understand the frequency
changes in a call:
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/page.aspx?pid=1059

Hope this helps!

Marc Hoffman
www.SongbirdPhoto.com
Kirkland, WA
tweeters "at" dartfrogmedia "dot" com



At 08:58 AM 10/26/2012, amy schillinger wrote:

>Amy,
>
>Funny you should ask this question because I just began reading 'The
>Singing Life of Birds' by Donald Kroodsma. He records bird songs and
>then transfers them to specrtograms to see what the song looks like.
>For instance, he says that within the Point Reyes area there are six
>distinct dialects of White-crowned Sparrows there and then proceeds
>to show you the spectrograms and how they look different. Pretty
>interesting so far but I've only read the first chapter so I'm not
>sure how the rest of the book will be.
>
>Amy Schillinger
>Renton, WA
>schillingera at hotmail.com
>
>
>----------
>Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:20:07 -0700
>From: 60stops2home at kalama.com
>To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
>Subject: [Tweeters] Bird Sound frequency in Hertz
>
>I'm always on the lookout for puzzles, and here's one I would love
>to solve. How can I found out the frequency ranges of bird sounds?
>
>Why would I want to know this? If I knew the frequency of a specific
>bird's song/call, I believe that information combined with other
>tools like mnemonics would help me identify more accurately what
>species I think I'm hearing deep in the grass, woods or high over my
>head in overcast skies.
>
>Not only that, with more than a half-century of use on my ears, I
>want to know what I could be missing.
>
>
>Amy Hill
>Kalama, Washington
>628 ft up in Cowlitz County
>60stops2home at kalama dot com