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2. Re: All-Night Recording Technique (was sequoia groves recording Augu

Subject: 2. Re: All-Night Recording Technique (was sequoia groves recording Augu
From: "Rob Danielson" danielson_audio
Date: Sat Aug 30, 2008 12:15 am ((PDT))
At 9:08 AM -0700 8/29/08, Dan Dugan wrote:
>Rob, you wrote,
>
>>  2) When I hit "stop" or use the timer to stop the recording, Amadeus
>>  creates a waveform "overview" file that shows me the whole night. I
>>  have found this view really useful for not only gaining a sense of
>>  the whole night's rhythms but for sensing the passage of time that I
>>  simply can't imagine when working with numerous segments. I take a
>>  screen shot of the overview and can "see" developments like the onset
>>  of insect species, etc, by looking at the overviews for a week.
>
>I looked at their web site
><<http://www.hairersoft.com/AmadeusPro/>http://www.hairersoft.com/AmadeusP=
ro/>,
>and Amadeus does make sonograms. Is that what you mean?

I was referring to simple amplitude vs. time waveforms of the whole
night. Amadeus links together multiple (>2 GB) files into one virtual
file/waveform. Here are some 7-10 hour waveforms from the last
several nights: http://tinyurl.com/6l84rc.  Provides a way to sense
changes in character from night to night and learn some behaviors.


>I scan Pro Tools waveform displays of my long recordings for events,
>but I'm sure I'm missing things that would show in a sonogram. A
>sonogram makes the nature of what happened obvious in many cases
>without having to listen to it. Besides Spectrafoo, which I use for
>real-time monitoring in the studio, the only software I have that
>displays spectrograms is Soundtrack Pro. I haven't been able to get my
>head around how to use that yet.

I do real time sonogram monitoring with IXL Spectragram which is an
AU plug by Elemental Audio. Its "live" window is only a few seconds
long.  Here's a window of a brief, distant coyote chorus in insects
that just occurred: (coyote =3D red squiggle 600-900 Hz):
http://tinyurl.com/5qhsgz

I played around with Amadeus' sonograms a bit to see if this feature
could be used for spotting distant species. I think it could as you
can "spot" or continuously play the sound in-sync with the sonogram.
The range and gain of the display can be fine-tuned at any time. The
only catch I was experiencing was some sonogram display lag when I
jumped quickly through the file but I think that was because I was
also recording to disk at the same time.  You have to create a
sonogram of the whole file before you can play the sound with the
in-sync graphic display which took about 10 minutes for a 7 hour
file. There's a "save sonogram function" but it crashed with the
large .flac file I was analyzing. I'll experiment. Might save them
for large pcm files.

>
>The National Park Service has automated audio observatories that
>collect continuous 1/3-octave analyses and periodic audio recordings.
>The NPS displays the full-time analyses as a series of twelve two-hour
>strips so that 24 hours fills one screen or page. The events are tiny,
>but it's easy to see the dawn chorus, tell prop planes from jets, etc.
>That's incredibly useful.

Definitely worth exploring. With the right sensitivity setting in
Amadeus, I can see fairly soft owl calls that would not be evident in
an amplitude waveform.

>
>Here's one the NPS annotated for example:
><<http://www.dandugan.com/downloads/NPS>http://www.dandugan.com/downloads/=
NPS
>Spectrogram.png
>>
>
>10,000 24-hour soundscape images collected by the NPS are going to be
>put on the web by Western Soundscape Archive.
><<http://www.westernsoundscape.org/>http://www.westernsoundscape.org/>


Their settings were adjusted primarily for louder, man-made events I
assume. I'll experiment to see what format Amadeus saves its .sono
files in-- assuming it will save them for large files without
crashing. Rob D.

>
>-Dan Dugan
>
>_


--






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