31–40 of 54 posts
It was a pretty awesome device.
Um, I'd like to be able to parse this article. but I don't know what it is saying. Can anyone explain the gist of it to me in simple terms? What does this mean? "These sonograms are remarkably different from other sounds, as if birds “draw” with sound something that’s flying backwards in time."
Audio person here. I found the post fascinating, but I wish they did more to explain what they were talking about to a layperson. Basically, all sounds that you hear are composed of many layered sine waves of different frequencies and intensities. The graphs in the post are spectrograms, which graph those frequencies over time. The Y axis represents pitch, the X axis represents time, and the brightness at any given p…
Are birds sending specific data packets eg weather, food prospecting geocoordinates? Or are they entertainers like Frank Sinatra or Dolly Parton?
And could we decipher the language by studying data in context eg food hunts, mating rituals, predator warnings?
What might Claude Shannon make of these spectrograms?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember that "cymascope" experiment that used a dolphin's sound as input. Turned out the water surface had an image (after lots of noise deblurring) of a human the dolphin just seen. This means the organ that decodes sound is a simple membrane with water. How dolphins encode images into sound is a separate question.
I don't remember this but would extremely interested to see it. Any link?
Um, I'd like to be able to parse this article. but I don't know what it is saying. Can anyone explain the gist of it to me in simple terms? What does this mean? "These sonograms are remarkably different from other sounds, as if birds “draw” with sound something that’s flying backwards in time."
Audio person here. I found the post fascinating, but I wish they did more to explain what they were talking about to a layperson. Basically, all sounds that you hear are composed of many layered sine waves of different frequencies and intensities. The graphs in the post are spectrograms, which graph those frequencies over time. The Y axis represents pitch, the X axis represents time, and the brightness at any given p…
Which is akin to dragging a single finger across different piano keys. Only a single frequency, or note, played at a time. This is common among songbirds.
Contrast that with the sound of a crow. The sonogram is much more broadband in signature. This is akin to mashing a bunch of keys on a piano all at the same time. Many frequencies present at simultaneously.
It makes sense to me that bird song would have few harmonics. Although we may appreciate the beauty of bird song they don't sing for aesthetics. They are signaling. Concentrating energy into a narrow band delivers greater range for the same energy than harmonically rich signals. We do likewise with electromagnetic communication.
When a bird sings to attract a mating partner, competing against other birds, does it not sing for aesthetics? Also, couldn’t harmonics be used to improve decoding in noisy environments? Spreading the signal over a wide band is not unheard of in man-made electromagnetic communication either.
If you were a bird, you'd spend so much time trying to change what you were that you'd forget to eat your worms and die.
It makes sense to me that bird song would have few harmonics. Although we may appreciate the beauty of bird song they don't sing for aesthetics. They are signaling. Concentrating energy into a narrow band delivers greater range for the same energy than harmonically rich signals. We do likewise with electromagnetic communication.
When a bird sings to attract a mating partner, competing against other birds, does it not sing for aesthetics? Also, couldn’t harmonics be used to improve decoding in noisy environments? Spreading the signal over a wide band is not unheard of in man-made electromagnetic communication either.
It makes sense to me that bird song would have few harmonics. Although we may appreciate the beauty of bird song they don't sing for aesthetics. They are signaling. Concentrating energy into a narrow band delivers greater range for the same energy than harmonically rich signals. We do likewise with electromagnetic communication.
1. Do we appreciate bird songs because they indicate a resource rich/hospitable environment?
2. Do birds hear the entire range of the song, or just pick up specific bands?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Audio person here. I found the post fascinating, but I wish they did more to explain what they were talking about to a layperson. Basically, all sounds that you hear are composed of many layered sine waves of different frequencies and intensities. The graphs in the post are spectrograms, which graph those frequencies over time. The Y axis represents pitch, the X axis represents time, and the brightness at any given p…
> on a sonogram, they appear as a single line. Which is akin to dragging a single finger across different piano keys. Only a single frequency, or note, played at a time. This is common among songbirds. Contrast that with the sound of a crow. The sonogram is much more broadband in signature. This is akin to mashing a bunch of keys on a piano all at the same time. Many frequencies present at simultaneously.
Crows, in the morning, seem to be broadcasting work gang related information, organising their crew to go and harvest certain regions, then report back on the yield.
If songbirds are courting, and hence broadcasting different information, for different purposes, I wonder if some generalisable differences might be apparent in the receiving birds brains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Audio person here. I found the post fascinating, but I wish they did more to explain what they were talking about to a layperson. Basically, all sounds that you hear are composed of many layered sine waves of different frequencies and intensities. The graphs in the post are spectrograms, which graph those frequencies over time. The Y axis represents pitch, the X axis represents time, and the brightness at any given p…
> on a sonogram, they appear as a single line. Which is akin to dragging a single finger across different piano keys. Only a single frequency, or note, played at a time. This is common among songbirds. Contrast that with the sound of a crow. The sonogram is much more broadband in signature. This is akin to mashing a bunch of keys on a piano all at the same time. Many frequencies present at simultaneously.
I think there's a key difference.
Assuming this is the spectrogram of single note being played on the Piano (https://soundshader.github.io/hss/gallery/piano/2.jpg) (which I can't be certain of, since the audio sample wasn't provided). Seems like a single piano note fires on multiple frequencies, and our ear 'aggregates' them so we hear it as a single note.
Songbird belts out a single frequency at each point in time. We still hear a single note but there's nothing to aggregate.
At least that's my interpretation of the parent comments. Again, can't be sure.
