Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong
by Bruyninckx, Joeri

Format: Hardcover
Release Date: 4/26/2018
Code: 14822
Condition: New
Product Details
The practice of recording birdsong took shape at the intersection of popular entertainment and field ornithology, turning recordings into objects of investigation and popular fascination. Shaped by the technologies and interests of amateur naturalism and music teaching, radio broadcasting and gramophone production, hobby electronics and communication engineering, birdsong recordings traveled back and forth between scientific and popular domains, to appear on gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and movie soundtracks.
Bruyninckx follows four technologies - the musical score, the electric microphone, the portable magnetic tape recorder, and the sound spectrograph - through a cultural history of field recording and scientific listening. He chronicles a period when verbal descriptions, musical notations, and onomatopoeic syllables represented birdsong and shaped a community of listeners; later electric recordings struggled with notions of fidelity, realism, objectivity, and authenticity; scientists, early citizen scientists, and the recording industry negotiated recording exchange; and trained listeners complemented the visual authority of spectrographic laboratory analyses. This book reveals a scientific process fraught with conversions, between field and laboratory, sound and image, science and its various audiences.
ISBN: 9780262037624
Publisher: MIT Press
Year of Publication: 2018
Page Count: 240
Shipping Weight: 2.00 lb