A fresh installation of Audacity isn’t optimised for scanning nocmig recordings, but with some simple tweaks it can be ready on demand.
This is interesting. I’ve been dabbling in bird song with Merlin recently. I didn’t know you could use Audacity to see audio as a Spectrogram. This post shows how.
I’ve only just head of nocmig.
The nocturnal equivalent of visible migration watching, and typically employs sound recording equipment to capture the flight calls of migrating birds.
This morning I joined in with the reveil Dawn Chorus Day 2024.
Reveil (2014—) is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 4 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.
I had to change my audio setup a little this year, a new phone put my lightning mic out of action, so I used a h4n recorder as a mic.
It was dark overcast and the ground was pretty wet, but it didn’t rain. All the way to the park the blackbirds were already singing loudly. A shadow fox seemed to be around a bin but no one else was about. There was a bit of traffic on the Expressway making a noise.
I got set up and was streaming by 4:30.
An old sim-less iPhone 6 using my broadcasting phone as a hot point allowed me to listen at the same time. It is quite strange listening to local birds in one ear and ones that are very far away in the other.
Unfortunately although I could hear the main stream the IRC widget on the page didn’t work for me. When I tested it earlier in the 24 hours it was fine, but this morning it wanted a password…
A short clip of my stream.
I could listen and see what was playing, look at the schedule and figure out it might be a little behind. I kept my broadcast running. I think just after 5:30 I heard a shout out for my stream. Unfortunately by that time a helicopter was flying around the park and the result was pretty unpleasant. The broadcast moves quite swiftly on to the next stream.
A clip with helicopter, I think this is what was broadcast, around a minute in!
Dawn View ~ 5:30am
Reveil was a good excuse/motivator to get up and listen for a while. I found it hard to listen and identify any birds locally, while listening to other sites. My bird song knowledge is not good. The old iPhone 6 wouldn’t let me use the Merlin app to sound ID. I am also interested in distributed collaboration so the whole process was good to see. There were some amazing broadcasts form around the world.
Listening back to some of my recordings I can hear just how much traffic and noise pollution there is even with helicopters.
If this is on next year and I join in, I might try going further afield to somewhere with less traffic and thinking about a better second device. I suppose that I could also try getting up and 3:30am all by myself, but I am not sure I’ve got the willpower or my wife would understand.
Volume 9 in an irregular series of specially created mixtapes for readers of Caught by the River.
I have seen links to this on Caught By the river a few times now. First time I followed up by listening. Really enjoyed a pretty eclectic mix of poetry & music.
I’ll be listening to more. I was disappointed that mixcloud does not support RSS feeds, so I had to use Huffduffer-video to listen to this on my commute. The Tracklist is on the Caught by the River site: Spoken Word & Nature Disco Vol. 9.
AudioMoth is a low-cost, full-spectrum acoustic logger, based on the Gecko processor range from Silicon Labs. Just like its namesake the moth, AudioMoth can listen at audible frequencies, well into ultrasonic frequencies. It is capable of recording uncompressed audio to microSD card at rates from 8,000 to 384,000 samples per second and can be converted into a full-spectrum USB microphone.
Looks a bit tricky to actually buy at the moment, but interesting device.
We are putting together a Google Earth Web sound map for UK National Parks.
We are a group of researchers, passionate about listening and about how we, as human beings, relate to the sounds around us in our daily lives.
Another interesting audio project. Reminds me of the UK SoundMap from a few years ago. The map itself seems to be lost:( I blogged about that UK Sound Map and joined in with a few boos.
I loved the way the UK Sound Map project allowed anyone to join in by recording an Audioboo and tagging it.
The National Parks Sound Map is a bit more manual, you upload a sound and fill in a form. I just added one to see how it works.
Locus Sonus Stream Project offers a worldwide network of "open mikes" that permanently stream local soundscapes to a dedicated server. The resulting live audio is used in a large variety of artistic projects. The microphones are installed and maintained by volunteer participants.
the use if “umm” conversationally as a filler, to keep the flow going to signal you have not completed the thought your brain is sending to your mouth
Hi Alan,
Thanks for this.
One thing I liked when I did Radio Edutalk was by doing the show live I felt no pressure to edit the archives, beyond a bit of levelling and trimming my technical problems at the start of a nicecast broadcast.
One of the values, to me, of listening to a podcast is the extra information, often emotional, that is carried by the voice. This research linked might support that premiss.
As podcasting gets a lot more professional, one of the downsides might be the loss of the unedited voice.
This is not about the pros and cons of Teams. This is not about whether it is better than Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, Rocket.Chat or Jitsi. It is about a single feature that is so widely used in Zoom that I did not even think a serious competitor can lack the function – sharing your system audio with your colleagues and audience while presenting something on your screen.
The use case for that is pretty easily outlined: Prerecorded videos, reruns of an earlier session, or just some basic background music – all of that exceeds the basic capabilities of Microsoft Teams in its current iteration.
Loopback enables you to combine the audio from multiple sources, including microphones and applications, then provide that combined audio to voice chat applications to be heard by all participants.
And
You won’t use the Pass-Thru source which is included by default, so remove it by clicking to highlight it, then pressing the Delete button.
I wonder if removing Pass-Thru makes much difference.
