science and technological development often run on many parallel roads... w=
e
should not polemize anymore and only tell about the enormous progress of th=
e
last 25 years. The Kay Sonograph DSP 5500 was presented in 1987 and
commercialized in 1988. I still own one my lab bought in 1988/89, its seria=
l
number is 0072, but it is broken. The cost was 80 millions of Italian Lires=
,
an enormous cost, many many times the cost of an average car. The software =
-
not real-time yet, used for the paper in 1987 derived from the one I
presented in my Thesis on computer analysis of bird songs in 1983. The
fastest cpu available in 1986 on personal pc was the Intel 8086 supported b=
y
the mathematical coprocessor Intel 8087 and only by programming in assemble=
r
it was possible to go near-real-time. In the next years it was required to
use additional DSP processors, like in the Kay, to get high frequency
sampling and real-time processing. However, in few years it was possible to
have a reasonable cost much faster cpus and larger storage.
This path was followed by many others and was obviously supported and made
possible by the lowering of computer costs and by the appearing of consumer
products, e.g. sound boards, with every day increasing quality. Freeware an=
d
shareware software also played an important role in widening the interest
for digital analysis of animal sounds.
Now we can have an almost complete bioacoustic lab with less than 1000=80, =
and
start working with few hundred euros. We should be very happy of this and i=
n
my lessons I always teach about the history and evolution of equipment.
Gianni
2011/4/9 Raimund <>
>
>
> > I would also recall the implementation of automatic frequency tracking,
> song
> > parsing and song description used for publishing a paper in 1987 on the
> song
> > of Cettia cetti. I see that something similar has been implemented in
> > Avisoft many years later...... mmmhhh strange....
>
> Gianni,
>
> I'm sorry to tell you that I wrote my first computer program for creating
> spectrograms also in 1987 during my studies in Electronics. I used an ATA=
RI
> 800XL with an A/D converter board that I designed myself. And I can assur=
e
> you that I had no access to your paper at that time. There were however
> other things that inspired me. The most important inspiration was perhaps
> the field guide on European bird voices (Stimmen der V=F6gel Europas) by
> Bergmann and Helb that was first published in Germany in 1982.
>
> Bye the way, I did not claim that I was the first one who wrote computer
> programs for analyzing animal sounds (I actually meant the specific
> optimization of the RECORDER software for recording bat sounds).
>
> There already existed a number of commercially available products in the
> mid 80ies, such as the KAY DSP Sona-Graph or a PC-based system by
> Loughborough Sound Images that were already applied to animal sounds. So,=
I
> guess that we can agree that we both were not the pioneers in the
> computer-based analysis of animal sounds ;-)
>
> Regards,
> Raimund
>
>
>
>
--
Centro Interdisciplinare di Bioacustica e Ricerche Ambientali
Universit=E0 degli Studi di Pavia
Via Taramelli 24, 27100 Pavia
http://www.unipv.it/cibra
http://mammiferimarini.unipv.it
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