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University Creates Online Western Sound Library

Posted on: Monday, 6 October 2008, 10:45 CDT

Rattlesnakes are not the friendliest creatures. Ordinarily, they are best left alone instead of being snuck up on. However, when it is your job to record the sounds of Western animals, you do not have the luxury of avoiding them.

"You get yourself in some strange situations," says Jeff Rice, a University of Utah research librarian who is working to produce the first complete free archive of natural sounds in the West for the public.

Rice was sitting in the hills above Utah, aiming his parabolic microphone at a Great Basin rattlesnake that was a few feet from him.

The snake was stubbornly silent for a few minutes. At last, it performed a lengthy rattle, both creepy and captivating, that obviously meant "keep away."
"I knew he'd come through," Rice said happily.

The recording will be edited into a clip and added to the Western Soundscape Archive, a Web-based sound clearinghouse located in the university library.

Although a new venture for the university, the website already has about 800 animal recordings. The library’s goal is to list the nearly 1,200 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians that wander through 11 Western states. The site will also feature "ambient soundscapes" from wild places across the country.

The sound clips in the future will be accessible to teachers, scientists and anyone fascinated by hearing the unusual hums of a sage grouse, javelina, Columbia spotted frog or mountain-dwelling moose.

The scenic recordings may offer a significant audio bookmark that could be used for future assessment when working to recognize how animals react to intruding changes such as subdivisions, oil and gas development, or a warming climate.

Rice approximates that the library has recordings of about 75 percent of the 53 frog and toad species in the states concerned in the project - Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The sound library has 70 percent of the birds and many of the mammal and reptile recordings.

Several of the sound clips have been donated to the archive. Many were up to Rice to get himself.

Rice has settled in Utah's distant San Rafael Swell to capture the prattle of beavers; spent hours in Lake Mead eavesdropping on relict leopard frogs; and called on a lab to record the Northern grasshopper mouse, a tiny rodent that rises on its hind legs to present a high-pitched whistle of caution.

"It's like a squeaky door," Rice stated.

In their native environments, animals are the most active in early morning and evening. Rice is equipped with hand-held digital recording equipment and a big goal.

"You leave at 2 a.m. and find yourself wandering around bleary-eyed in a swamp," he said. "Sometimes you wonder what you're doing."

Rice has recognized the importance of his work. As natural places continue to fade away, so do the animal noises that garnish them.

The World Conservation Union notes that one in three amphibian species is in danger of becoming extinct. Rice wishes to catch as many of these species on tape as soon as possible before they've vanished.

"It's very much a race against time," he said.

The audio footage, even heard from the security of a computer, can rouse something primitive in the listener, a sudden desire to leave quickly, especially in listening to the rattlesnake.

"Responses to those kinds of sounds are almost reflexive," said Kurt Fristrup, a scientist with the National Park Service's natural sounds office in Fort Collins.

He thinks Rice's archive could assist people learn what animals they’ve been listening to in the wild, even if they can't observe them.

"Most of us learn to ignore what our ears tell us and focus on the task at hand because we live in really noisy habitat," Fristrup noted. "But in some ways, hearing is the most alerting sense, directing us to things that matter."

There are already several existing sound files obtainable on the Web.  An example is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology located in Ithaca, N.Y., which states that it has the leading sound and video files of animal behavior in the country.

In Rice’s opinion, the West has not been properly recorded.

"I think we have a tendency to take for granted what we have in our own backyard," Rice says.

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On the Net:

• University of Utah
• Western Soundscape Archive

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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