Book ID: CBB552394522

Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong (2018)

unapi

Bruyninckx, Joeri (Author)


The MIT Press


Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 256
Language: English

The transformation of sound recording into a scientific technique in the study of birdsong, as biologists turned wildlife sounds into scientific objects.Scientific observation and representation tend to be seen as exclusively visual affairs. But scientists have often drawn on sensory experiences other than the visual. Since the end of the nineteenth century, biologists have used a variety of techniques to register wildlife sounds. In this book, Joeri Bruyninckx describes the evolution of sound recording into a scientific technique for studying the songs and calls of wild birds and asks, what it means to listen to animal voices as a scientist. The practice of recording birdsong took shape at the intersection of popular entertainment and field ornithology, turning recordings into objects of investigation and popular fascination. Shaped by the technologies and interests of amateur naturalism and music teaching, radio broadcasting and gramophone production, hobby electronics and communication engineering, birdsong recordings traveled back and forth between scientific and popular domains, to appear on gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and movie soundtracks.Bruyninckx follows four technologies―the musical score, the electric microphone, the portable magnetic tape recorder, and the sound spectrograph―through a cultural history of field recording and scientific listening. He chronicles a period when verbal descriptions, musical notations, and onomatopoeic syllables represented birdsong and shaped a community of listeners; later electric recordings struggled with notions of fidelity, realism, objectivity, and authenticity; scientists, early citizen scientists, and the recording industry negotiated recording exchange; and trained listeners complemented the visual authority of spectrographic laboratory analyses. This book reveals a scientific process fraught with conversions, between field and laboratory, sound and image, science and its various audiences.

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Reviewed By

Review Rachel Mundy (2023) Review of "Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong". Technology and Culture (pp. 243-245). unapi

Review Kristoffer Whitney (2019) Review of "Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong". Journal of the History of Biology (pp. 491-492). unapi

Review Matthew Holmes (2019) Review of "Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong". Metascience: An International Review Journal for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (pp. 281-284). unapi

Review Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie (2019) Review of "Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 632-633). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB552394522/

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Authors & Contributors
Culver, Annika A.
Ian J. Mason
Karl Schulze-Hagen
Jackson Pope
Gilbert H. Pfitzner
Trachtenberg, Zev
Concepts
Ornithology
Birds
Animal behavior
Biographies
Conservation biology
Naturalists
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
20th century, early
Places
United States
Great Britain
London (England)
Japan
Germany
Australia
Institutions
Cornell University, Laboratory of Ornithology
Cornell Library of Natural Sounds
British Trust for Ornithology
Cornell University
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)
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