Hi ams...
Thank you for posting this recording. The cicada song is very
interesting and has a beautiful musical quality in places.
It would potentially be of interest to hear the recording without
compression. Here, where I live, it is also very hot in summer and the
sonic landscape is dominated by cicada songs, especially in the late
afternoon. Not only are they loud, but the loudness varies in complex
patterns and the 'song' has multiple frequency components. If you plot
a spectrogram from your recording (eg., using Avisoft SASlab lite or
similar) you may see harmonics going up into the >18 KHz range or even
ultrasonic. I have ordered a Dodotronics Ultramic200 in part for this
purpose, to explore further the ultrasonic components of the cicada
songs. Anyway, if possible, it would be interesting to hear the same
recording without compression.
Best regards,
-john
--- In Abhijit Menon-Sen <>
wrote:
>
> 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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