Friends:
I, too, would like to read a discussion of how people use their nature
recordings: What do you do with yours?
Just to start things off, here are a few random thoughts and comments on
the topic.
1. As Martyn says, ambient recordings have potential value as scientific
data. Here I'd point out that the value is dependent on extremely good
documentation (supplementary data) and curatorial practices. The
recordings aren't too much use if people who need them can't find and
use them, or can't associate exact dates and locations etc. with them.
A clearing house/database of available ambient recordings available for
use could be an important tool.
2. Other uses of recordings include donating appropriate ones to
bioacoustics archives or directly to a scientist who's interested. That
is, some of us focus a lot of effort on documenting sounds from a
particular organism and associating them with behavioral observations.
Sometimes these recordings can be of use to researchers.
3. Another use of recordings is to assemble a guide to natural sounds in
a region or to the sounds of a particular group of animals. For example,
Jim Morgan's project on North American bird songs is extremely nice and
highly regarded, both as a reference and as tool for learning to
identify birds by sound. It is based solely (I believe) on donated
recordings. So people could start similar projects, or join in on one to
which they contribute. It'd be especially interesting to have things
like this available on the WEB where school kids could use them easily.
4. I've entertained myself by making songrams of bird songs and insect
sounds and thinking of them as a graphic art --- basically, calligraphy.
Print 'em big and put 'em on the wall! I'm a complete hack at this, but
imagine there's lots of possibilities for uses of graphical
representations of sounds. So one could try to hook up with a graphical
artist and see what happens.
5. I make "Birdsong Quiz" CDs that I distribute to friends and family as
gifts. The idea is to edit together a batch of bird sounds as if they
were being heard as one walks around in a particular location. The first
part of the quiz is to name all the birds, the second is to specify the
date and location where the sounds could have occurred as the appear in
the quiz. My quizzes run between 5 and 20 minutes and are followed on
the CD with a copy of the recording with voice-over identifications of
the sounds. Over the years, I've started to get more sophisticated and
based the whole quiz on an uninterrupted ambient recording as a
background. With all the bucks people throw at birdwatching stuff these
days, I'd bet there's commercial potential for this sort of thing.
6. Another thing I make is a bird song computer game for kids. It is
controlled by javascript and runs in a web browser. Basically, 9 photos
of birds appear on the screen and a song plays. User tries to click on
the picture of the bird that is singing. Feed back is something like
"No, that's a picture of a Blue Jay. Try again." or "Yes! That is an
American Robin". Then there are new pictures and another recording...
Cheers!
Steve P
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