At the chosen moment the cutting stylus was lowered onto the recording medium, a wax disc or, later, an aluminum disc with a pressure-sensitive acetate coating, revolving at 78 rpm. Cables were run to the recording plant, a cumbersome machine that would be located up to a mile from the microphone, where the operator would monitor the signal through headphones or a small speaker. The technique for this method of field recording was refined by 1926 with the introduction of the electrical microphone, positioned and camouflaged close to where the subject was expected to vocalize.
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The first gramophone record of a bird singing was issued in England in 1910, a 10-inch, 78 rpm disc featuring a nightingale recorded by Karl Reich in Berlin.
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The machine had to be positioned close to the subject, and it was found that the noise of the stylus cutting the wax tended to disturb the bird and curtail the song. Judd in 1898 to play recorded birdsong to an academic audience for the first time ever at the 16th Congress of the American Ornithologists’ Union in Washington, D.C., and also for the first recordings of wild birds, at Kenley, England, in 1900, when Cherry Kearton captured the songs of the nightingale and song thrush. The cylinders, whose recording time was limited to around two minutes, were played back on the same machine. It was cut on the first retailed recording device, the Edison cylinder machine, which focused the sound through a horn onto a stylus, whose vibrations cut a groove into the surface of a wax cylinder revolving at a speed of 160 rotations per minute (rpm). The earliest known bird recording, of a captive Indian shama at the Frankfurt Zoo, was made in 1889 by the godfather of bird recording, Ludwig Koch, then aged eight years old. This article is adapted from John Bevis’s book “ Aaaaw to zzzzzd: The Words of Birds.” Collecting and recording bird sounds is more popular than ever, with the development of affordable, high-quality recording and archiving equipment, while improving technology and resources have resulted in birdsong being frequently sampled in contemporary music. Their great advantages over verbal notation are veracity and lack of ambiguity their disadvantages that they record the particular rather than the general, and have no mnemonic expedient. Field RecordingĬontemporary field guides to birdsong are commonly audio books accompanied by CDs of birds performing in the wild. Here, we see the history of alternative attempts to collect bird songs and sounds, from musical composition through recording devices to duck calls, bird organs, singing bird automata, and varieties of bird clock. That project culminated in “ Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds,” the appendice to which is featured below. Twenty-five years ago I sought for the first time to collect, sift, and standardize these wonderful, bizarre words with their anarchic spellings, absurd pronunciations, and uncertain meanings. A muddled, contentious, and inconsistent vocabulary, the harvest of the jottings of different naturalists in different places, who hear differently and record differently, whose variation is boundless and consensus occasional: Their liberty and ours to spell the “words” of birds as promiscuously as the Elizabethans spelled the spoken word.
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Their legacy is a glorious vocabulary of thousands of unique words, from the aaaaw of the black skimmer to the zzzzzd of the lazuli bunting.
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Since literature began, poets and naturalists have coined words and phrases which attempt to replicate the sounds birds make.