Hope you'll be posting this soon, Walt. ATRAC's fine with me.
>And if you ever managed to catch me giving my Pine Barrens Treefrog call
>you'd know just how little quality matters. Or listen to folks who call
>game birds.
<snip>
>I agree, especially about how much the environment degrades sound, but
>what's interesting about this is that one of the repeated big arguments
>about ATRAC is that it will ruin the quality of the sound so a animal
>won't respond, because they are so much more discriminating than we are.
>The sound hardly has to be perfect.
>
>In some animals the difference between the males and females is
>genetically locked in. The Coqui frogs, for instance, the males and
>females have different frequency sensitivities and a single call from a
>male contains both the territorial warning at one frequency and the
>attraction for the female at a different frequency. So it's a entirely
>different sounding call to each.
>
>And if you ever managed to catch me giving my Pine Barrens Treefrog call
>you'd know just how little quality matters. Or listen to folks who call
>game birds.
>
>Walt
>
>
>Kevin J. Colver wrote:
>> I seem to remember long ago a comment suggesting that birds responded to
>> a recording, thus suggesting that the recording was of good quality.
>> This brings up an interesting field of inquiry-what is the nature of
>> avian response to the sounds they hear?
>>
>> A chapter in Catchpole and Slater's "Bird Song, Biological themes and
>> variations" presents an interesting discussion on the topic. It appears
>> that males and females have different discriminating tastes when it
>> comes to song they hear.
>>
>> Females have all their reproductive eggs in one basket, so to speak,
>> thus they are very careful and discriminating in listening and
>> responding to song. They are more sensitive to poor quality and
>> defective songers. It is important that they choose the best quality
>> singer available. Males, on the other hand, need to chase off every
>> rival including rookie singers and even imitators such as mockingbirds.
>> Thus they will respond to almost anything that sounds even close to a
>> conspecific song. I presume therefore that female response to playback
>> would be a better indicator of the quality of the recording than would
>> male response. (And this discussion will refer largely to songbirds,
>> there is great variation among species even in this group.)
>>
>> The issue is further clouded by the fact that almost every song the
>> birds hear in the wild is already degraded by distance and environmental
>> factors. The birds are programmed to respond to degraded sound.
>> Indeed, they can discriminate the degree and quality of song degradation
>> to extract information on how far away and what direction the singer is
>> located.
>>
>> Thus the fact that a bird responds to playback is only a very crude
>> assay of the quality of a recording.
>
>
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