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.
