Hi Julius--
Enjoying your recording. Could there be two mammals, one coming up
from behind and another, to the left, that growls? I believe I can
even hear a vocalization in the rear(?) (~12:11) a few seconds before
the growl. Seem unlikely the animal who growls could get over the
right mic in 20 seconds without making footstep sounds. Could it be
the animal who comes up from the rear trips on the cable? He/she may
have been preoccupied with the other mammal. I might hear a couple of
very faint leaf "crackles" in the ~4 seconds before the mic is jarred
loose, but I'm not hearing sniffing which I'd expect before a tug.
You said the recorder had been moved, did the cable run to the
ground? Rob D.
At 1:35 PM +0000 7/7/06, Julius Thyssen wrote:
>During a stay at my mother's in the heart of France recently,
>I noticed how there were literally hundreds of male frogs
>doing their chorus in the night. This choire was actually
>keeping us all awake ;-)
>
>Luckily I had a recording set with me.
>
>For those interested in a 14 minutes long chunk out of the
>hours of croaking ribbits I'm now in posession of, here it is:
>
>http://audio.jthz.com/rec/frrrogs_june2006.ogg (50 MB !)
>
>The original recordings are worth money, so I'm not handing this out
>uncompressed. This high bitrate Ogg Vorbis example is pretty much
>transparent though.
>
>Now for the mystery I want to solve:
>
>While this (example) recording was made, I was a couple of hundred
>meters away from the mics. Left it alone in the dark woods. This meant
>that all kinds of night-creatures curiously came to check out my
>recording set. This is why I've taken out THIS 15 minutes of the
>total, there are some strange breathings and steps to be heard in the
>recording.
>You will notice how around 11:04 the frogs fall quiet. This is
>probably the moment one or more larger animals or preditors close in
>on where the set was. (The frogs also went silent when *I* entered the
>scene, so that makes sense..)
>Around 11:54 you hear the HD-recorder spin up its drive (unfortunately).
>Around 12:18 you hear some kind of preditorial sound at the left..
>Around 12:38 you hear how my right-channel microphone gets pulled down
>by some animal. (Trust me, you would need some force to make that
>happen..) Could this be a fox? I assume it's the animal you hear
>snoring around 12:18.
>
>The recording is binaural, where I carefully used a tree to service as
>the head with the mics as its ears. The top was sawed off, and the
>mics were at around 1.70 m height, as 'ears' directed towards this
>lake: http://jult.nl/indre/lage_meer?full=3D1
>The mics were positioned at the shoreside left of what you see in the
>picture.
>
>When I got there, I found the mic in the grass, and the recorder moved
>away about 10 inches from its original spot. I had its buttons locked,
>so it kept recording it all. Either way it's fascinating how amazingly
>quiet this animal was..
>I'm very curious what you think happened.
>--
>Julius Thyssen
>
>
>
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