Michael Gallagher wrote:
>Thanks Dan for your draft procedure for amateur recording in parks.
>
>I very much like your term" "attended soundscape monitoring".
Not my term...the National Park Service came up with that.
>The
>simultaneous taking of field notes is an essential part of making
>scientifically credible sound recordings.
Yes, and it's an area where I really need to clean up my act.
>I am interested in relating bird vocalization to bird behaviour. I
>usually make written notes while recording. My recordings have far more
>value, if I observe alertly and take notes while recording is in
>progress.
>
>I am particularly interested in solving the problem of increasing the
>accessibility of notes taken in the field and linking them more
>directly to the associated sound recordings.
Hear, hear!
>In notebooks, I have linked written observations to MiniDiscs via
>recording session number label entries. The notes remain rather
>inaccessible, however, unless I take the time to transcribe them into
>into database records. More recently, I have begun note keeping via a
>Palm PDA. I enjoy the convenience of feeding those notes directly into
>a computer via the sync cradle.
>
>I usually start a field note by pasting the time from the PDA's clock.
>I work with sound files in Peak 4. I am experimenting with placing
>notes taken in the field into sound files as markers. I would like to
>be able to specify the start time of a track so that times in my
>written notes corresponded directly to times in the audio track.
That sounds like one way of getting metadata (that's the term for
associated data) into a sound file. Unfortunately, it's probably
limited to that software only so that's risky, future-wise.
I've heard that the BWAV (broadcast wave) file format accommodates
metadata, but I don't know anything about the details. It seems to me
that it would be ideal if the data chunk were in a format like a tab
and return-delimited text file so that it could be extracted in the
future even if the originating software was long dead.
Wouldn't it be great if you could plug the PDA into your recorder,
and it would add the metadata to the file? Dreaming. But something
like that -is- available with the Aaton Cantar recorder.
>I would like to know more about the "Soundscape" Palm software
>developed by the Park Service that you wrote of. Is it available for
>purchase?
I think it's available for free. Ask Dave Schirokauer:
He said recently that there was money of one more cycle of
development. I've been lobbying for a more generalized design that
could be used for note-taking while recording. You can customize the
buttons now, but it has to be done through Microsoft Access on the
associated computer.
I've been thinking that a private party might take over the
development of this product if the NPS stops.
>Thanks for posting your draft recording procedures. I wish you and your
>volunteer team every success in persuading the wider community of the
>value of your threatened woodland.
Thanks. Muir Woods is preserved in perpetuity (National Monument),
but it is threatened by outside noise, air pollution, global warming,
and over-use.
-Dan Dugan
copy: Dave Schirokauer
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