Rob Danielson wrote:
How
> about this: gear choices allow one to record with less or more
> approximation and choices in post can be towards more faithful or
> less faithful reproduction? Circumstance, attitude and
> science/technology. Aren't the differences we perceive in recordings
> best tested by communicability than by sonogram?
I would certainly agree, no recording technique, equipment etc will give
you exactly the sound that was there. I think I have stated this a
number of times in the past.
And one of the big reasons why we spend on fancy gear is so we will have
to do less post processing to get the result we want. That's part of the
value of those expensive mics, a huge lot of time we won't be working on
the recording later. In fact it's probably the sort of reason why we are
not all recording with a $1 capsule stuck on the end of a stick with
chewing gum. We like the work part of this to be easier.
We will still end up working on the recordings, of course, for other
reasons. For instance, I'm in the middle of driving myself nuts trying
to get a nice clear 20 second clip of each of Georgia's species of frogs
to go into the ID part of the CD in the works. Very little of that is
removing unwanted general noise, or adjusting the call itself. In most
cases it's trying to remove as many of the calls of other types of
animals as possible. A "perfect" MKH recording that contained 6 species
of frogs and several species of insects might be near impossible to use.
It would be nice if I had perfect recordings of each species by itself
in the 800 plus site recordings I have, but that's not reality. Maybe by
the time I die....
I'm going to be glad to move into making clips for the chorus part of
the CD. Far less to have to try and get out, if anything. Just trucks,
cars, airplanes, trains, irrigation pumps, barking dogs, cows......
Certainly communicability is a very important consideration in our
recordings. My recommendation of using a sonogram while doing filtering
and other processing is that it will help that process, not hinder it.
More than half the frogs I've processed have multifrequency calls. Our
ears hear it like it's a single call, but the sonogram shows all those
parts of the call, even the faint parts. It makes it a lot easier to
know that if you intrude above, say 400hz with a Eastern Spadefoot call
that you will be hitting the low part of his call. And even more of a
problem is the upper part, if removed it only makes a slight difference
in the call by ear, and those unfamiliar with the call would probably
not notice. But somewhere down the road someone is going to say it does
not sound right. In my case, with the two recordings I've managed of
this elusive species the sonogram tells me this upper part also overlaps
calls of other species in the recording I'd love to remove. I work both
listening and sonograms to juggle such things.
If we go entirely to what we can hear by ear, I expect no more arguments
against minidisc based on they might remove something we don't hear :-)
Sonograms are also part of learning about these calls, and other sounds
too. They tell us a great deal about how the call is built by the
animal. Details that are hard to pick out by ear.
There is one other reason why I use sonograms. My old ears do not hear
high pitched sounds well. If I went by what I hear, younger ears are
going to complain. I can not accurately filter the upper half of the
audio band by ear. But I certainly can see on a sonogram what happened.
Nature recording grew out of Scientific recording. It really first began
to be noticed by the general public only recently with the publication
of whale sounds being the first big push. We now have folks moving into
nature recording with no connection to science whatsoever. Many of these
come from the world of music recording, and bring their traditions with
them. There is nothing at all wrong with this, or the interest in nature
recordings as pure entertainment. But there is a problem if we then end
up attempting to make nature recording conform to just those traditions.
Nature recording will use what's useful out of that, of course, but it's
got it's own unique set of problems and goals. This will be reflected in
how we go about our craft. Like the use of sonograms, which many music
recordists seem to find so strange, and are so natural for a scientist
like me. I find some of the tests they do equally strange as they are
really tests of how well your analog tape recorder is doing, or
something like that. I was around when many of those tests were first
popularized.
Walt
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