Charles Bragg wrote:
> For some reason, some people like to treat animals' response
to sound (and everything else) as if it were an inflexible math
equation. I haven't heard yet of anyone trying to dissect Maria Callas'
voice in this way. We all understand there is a large psycho-acoustic
component in human hearing - why not in animals too?
When you get into investigating what turns up under the umbrella of
psycho-acoustic, everything we record has psycho-acoustic stuff in it.
No matter what we record it with.
Years ago I took a course in marine phytoplankton ecology. Thinking it
might be about ecology. Taught by a oceanographer, I was treated to the
development of a very ugly differential equation, nothing else was
taught for a entire quarter. The biologist (me) kept thinking there is
no way you can ever get accurate numbers to even test the equation.
Oceanography is a field that developed out of engineering or physics
rather than biology. They do what they know, no matter how
inappropriate. There is a big segment of sound that's the same, comes
from physics, engineering, with a smattering of psychology thrown in
(the part that worships statistics). They do what they know, even if it
seems pretty silly to others.
> Any birder can tell you that sometimes birds respond to calls
of closely-related species (I kept getting the wrong rockjumper
answering tapes in So Africa), and sometimes they don't respond to their
own calls (sick? moody? hiding?). I'm not going to hold my breath
waiting for Cornell to prove that ATRAC recordings don't function as
well as 48/256 uncompressed laser-etched titanium crystal recordings.
In my area of frogs, the fact that they will respond to the awful
imitations I and other herps folks use is proof enough that one cannot
use the argument that they are looking for some tiny characteristic of
the call. Many will also respond to passing cars, or even airplanes.
Biology is not cut and dried math.
> Tech is fun, but really, sometimes ......
Sometimes the rest of us can get some real amusement out of tech's foibles.
Walt
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