In response to Dave M.'s kind request for me to
clarify my original email, I hope that this helps:
1) Are there presently any formal plans to provide
television series, radio series, audio-books,
books-with CDs/tapes, experiential education, etc...,
to spread the awareness and experience of
Bioacoustics, and the increased wider public
awareness, recognition, and understanding of sounds in
life generally, worldwide, to become more of a norm in
daily experience?
2) I wish to set up a large-scale endeavour, ideally
to originate within the UK, that, if it has a future,
is to aid everyone with regards to all aspects of
climatic change, all aspects of genuinely (rather than
fashionably) sustainable and survivable living, a
massive increase and broadening of people's awareness,
increasing and re-introducing individual's personal
skills base, talent/s/callings, and very much more. If
this has a future, then I would hope (and integrally
intend) that experiential education of all ages and
abilities/so-called disabilities in understanding,
recognising, and daily being aware of all of the
senses (i.e. not just cerebral & visual), including of
sound, bird sounds, marine mammal sounds, bioacoustics
and inanimate sounds generally, etc... as a norm
within the education systems be promulgated and become
a norm. The encouragement of persons who are more
reliant on sound in daily life (e.g. persons who are
blind, or otherwise disabled say) as teachers in these
fields, would be desired. Similarly, the encouragement
of the involvement of (current/ex.) sonar operators
and acoustics professionals would be similarly keenly
encouraged. If all of this has a future, for example.
3) For the moment, in or from the UK, we have access
to bird sounds obviously outdoors, or via the products
of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds,
or Geoff Sample's, Mark Constantine's, or the
British Library's CDs say, as examples, but these
form a relatively small fraction of the educational
literature, sensory-usage, or subject matter generally
at this time. It is less easy still for marine mammal
sounds, in sufficient quantity and with sufficient
understanding of what is going on behaviourally and
technically say, to be available to the UK public for
example, other than via a few coastal educational
visitor centres, internet searches, or buying marine
mammal sounds with music appended via the local
joss-stick shop, say.
4) It is perhaps the case that, barring specific
centres of expertise and education worldwide of
course, or acoustic-art arrangements, that most of the
bioacoustic and related information currently remains
the privy of specialist academic or military units. I
wonder if an effort could get underway to change
that?
Not least, a person of any age who becomes more aware
of sounds in daily life -- for example, bird, bat,
mammal, wind, music, underwater, seismic, etc. -- will
be more aware of their possible impact upon the
sources of those sounds by what they and we all do in
our daily lives, and this may additionally help us all
to reduce our 'adverse' impacts, whilst increasing our
care and understanding for other things. This cannot
happen so effectively, of course, if only a few units
maintain the requisite information.
All the very best, and a belated Happy Easter!
Christopher (Chris.) McCOY
Shortly to begin work with BAS, Cambridge, in another
engineering field, in the UK.
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