Hi.
I don't know anything about insects, but the sound of Cicadas is
inescapable on a visit to the Kumaon hills in Uttarakhand, India.
Here's a recording of one singing in the evening on a recent trip:
http://toroid.org/ams/snd/cicada.mp3
Equipment: Olympus LS-11 with inbuilt microphones (LOW/10)
Processing: Fade-in/out, compression, equalisation (audacity)
The cicada is loud enough that anything I did in audacity probably makes
little difference, but I would appreciate comments about the recording.
Does it sound strange in some way I don't recognise? I used compression
because some people said my last recording was "not loud enough". When I
did that, I could hear a dog barking far away down the valley, so I used
the equaliser to de-emphasise everything under the cicada's ~2KHz signal
(which also got rid of a tiny bit of wind noise).
Later, it struck me that it may have been better to equalise first and
compress later (if at all; I'm wondering if it's better to say "sorry,
I can't make it louder" to people who ask).
Even later (just now, while writing this), I found the Effects->Plugins
submenu in Audacity, and perhaps I should have used a high-pass filter
instead of equalisation. Not sure.
I didn't see the cicada, of course, but it was in a tree growing on the
slope below the road, on whose edge I was standing. I'd guess it was no
more than three metres away. (If anyone can guess what species it is, I
would be happy to know. I heard hundreds of them.)
-- ams
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