Monday, November 12, 2007

Slowed Down Bird Songs

Beth downloaded some cool audio software that allows you to very easily slow down a song and still keep the same pitch. After trying it out with some songs from Bob Seger, Metallica, and Modest Mouse, I moved on to bird songs. By slowing down the complex songs of some birds, you can really see how truly unbelievable they are. Harmonies, slurs, and lightning-fast pitch changes show how impressive an organ the syrinx is. Here are a few samples. I had some problems with the volume and the length of the recordings. For some reason, the end of the recordings got cut off a bit. I'll figure it out and post more soon.

(I had originally embedded these files, but some folks had problems loading them. You should be able to click on the links to play the files.)

Hermit Thrush

Bobolink

Winter Wren

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

I gave it a try and it asked me to download something! Still didn't work but I think its more my browser's problem than anything else!Must be the same thing Cornell is using,I can never hear their stuff!

John B. said...

I'm getting a missing plugin message too.

Patrick B. said...

Monarch, that is strange. They are MP3 format and should work in any IE or Firefox browser. I'll send it to some other folks to try out. It's not using any special software.

Patrick B. said...

Let's try it again. I made some changes.

entoto said...

When you said you had slowed down some songs the FIRST one I wanted to hear was the Hermit Thrush. Thanks!

dguzman said...

Lang Elliot did this on a CD that came with his Music of the Birds book. He slowed down the thrush songs, and I completely fell in love.

Anonymous said...

Patrick - very cool indeed! I was especially glad for the Winter Wren slowed down. It really gives a better and more intelligible portrait of the structure of these songs, each of which can be so complex when heard either in the field or played at a standard speed. Thanks! By the way, the intro and exit song for BirdNote is Nancy Rumbel's work.

Larry said...

It's not working for me but I remember going to a seminar with the author of The Singing Life Of Birds. He slowed down the songs of birds such as the Hermit Thrush and it was fascinating!

Larry said...

Now I've got it.I had to unblock the pop up blocker.I was surprised at the Bobolink.They sound a lot more complex when slowed down. The Winter Wren was great but I would expect it to be with all the notes they spew out at normal speed.-Great idea-thanks!

Anonymous said...

I think that you need to do a little more work on today's post it looks like an interesting post but it shows only some garbled text in my browser (SeaMonkey--a mozilla project)

Patrick B. said...

I guess my former life as a web programmer isn't helping out in this world of multiple web browsers. I miss the days of just IE and Netscape. It definitely works on IE 6.0 and 7.0. I decided to do it the easy way and just provide links to the files.

birdchick said...

Hey Patrick,

what's the software? I must have it!

Patrick B. said...

The software is WavePad. There is also one called Audacity that is very popular.