OK, I want to try a different approach that might help make some of these recordings a little easier to listen to. I have the benefit of some good spectrogram software to use when I'm studying the audio I collect in the field. My ears and eyes are so tuned in to what's happening on the screen and in my head phones, that I often hear things very clearly when in reality they are faint sounds at best to someone listening on their computer speakers.
I don't want to waste anyone's time posting faint recordings that only an audio fan like me could learn to appreciate, but unfortunately my research area is so large that the vocalizers I capture are often at significant distance, a quarter to half mile being the norm.
So this time, instead of sharing a link to an obscure audio recording, I'm going to share a couple links to some short videos of the audio files as they play back in my spectrogram application. These were recorded within the last hour of daylight, last Friday evening, at a remote location in the Monongahela National Forest:
In this first clip I was 200 yards south of the mic and recorder, and could clearly here the wood knock response to my whoop and knock. The recorder captured the response as well, but not as clearly as my own ears could hear it. The spectrogram tells the story better:
About 20 minutes later I was back at the location of the recorder and mic and did another whoop and wood knock. This seemed to elicit still more vocals and several easily heard wood knocks from an entirely different direction than the response described above:
These two videos are my first attempt at this approach and I hope they'll be more effective than just sharing an audio file. Please feel free to comment on the results or offer any suggestions that might make things better.
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