Sound Sterile: Making Scientific Field Recordings in Ornithology

Bruyninckx, Joeri

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195388947.013.0035

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Field workers used such tape recorders – lighter, cheaper, and easier to handle than a cumbersome gramophone disc-cutter – to collect a greater numbers of recordings, thereby documenting the often subtle diversity of bird song in more detail. Combined with the newly introduced sound spectrograph – an instrument that analyzed and visually represented the acoustical spectrum of brief sound fragments – the tape recorder afforded the first bio-acousticians an unprecedented control over their acoustic data (Bruyninckx, 2012b; Mundy, 2009). Together, the magnetic tape recorder and spectrograph initiated a dramatic boom in post-war studies of animal communication (Marler and Slabbekoorn, 2004).…”

Section: Contexts Of Field Recordingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The tool was not only efficient and useful when recording animals in flight or at a distance in the field, but it also had distinct scientific and commercial advantages for the CLNS. Scientifically, focused recordings tended to produce ‘cleaner’, less noisy spectrograms than traditional recording techniques (Bruyninckx, 2012b). 45 Commercially, recordings with high signal-to-noise ratio were especially appealing, as they had several potential applications.…”

Section: Social Capital: Exchanging Favorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Trading twitter: Amateur recorders and economies of scientific exchange at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds

Bruyninckx

2015

Soc Stud Sci

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Scientists have long engaged in collaborations with field collectors, but how are such collaborations established and maintained? This article examines structures of collaborative data collection between professional scientists and various field recorders around the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. The Library collects animal sound recordings for use in education, preservation, and entertainment, but primarily in the scientific field of bio-acoustics. Since 1945, the Library has enlisted academic researchers, commercial recorders and broadcasters (such as the British Broadcasting Corporation), and amateur sound hunters in its expansion. I argue that the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds managed to craft and sustain a crucial network of contributors through creative and strategic brokering with its collection of recordings/data. Drawing on notions from exchange theory, I show that sound recordings were valued not just as scientific data, but also as copyrighted commodities that could be bought, sold, traded, and converted in a range of economic, social, and symbolic capitals within collaborators' respective social fields. Thus, aligning collaborators' interests, these exchange relations enabled the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds to negotiate amateur recorders' reliability, willingness to share work, and commitment to scientific standards, as well as the bonds that solidified their collaboration with the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Attending to the micro-economics of data exchange, this article thus brings into perspective the multi-dimensional processes through which data-flows are managed.

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Section: Contexts Of Field Recordingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Capital: Exchanging Favorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trading twitter: Amateur recorders and economies of scientific exchange at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds

Bruyninckx

2015

Soc Stud Sci

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“…In conjunction with this work, a research program funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and coordinated by Karin Bijsterveld examined a diversity of listening arrangements in professional practices related to science, engineering, and medicine under the rubric of "sonic skills". The notion of sonic skills (Bijsterveld 2009;Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012a;Supper and Bijsterveld 2015) stresses the entwinement of listening skill (and the ability to engage in different modes of listening) with concrete practical skills in the making, recording, storing and retrieving of sound in such contexts as hospital wards (Harris and Van Drie 2015), conference halls (Supper 2015), shop floors (Krebs 2014), field sites (Bruyninckx 2012) and laboratories. The papers in this special issue both draw on and extend this work.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sonic skills in cultural contexts: theories, practices and materialities of listening

Bruyninckx

Supper

2016

Sound Studies

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“…In this regard, noise referred interchangeably to acoustic interference as well as scrambled information, which were both unintelligible and unpleasant at the same time. Just as the close-up recording sampled the sound against a seemingly generic, mute backdrop, such calligraphic techniques too placed the visualized sound against a white, and therefore equally 'mute', background (Bruyninckx, 2012). Visualization thus functioned as a powerful filter to distinguish pattern from noise.…”

Section: Figure 54mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound science: recording and listening in the biology of bird song, 1880-1980

Bruyninckx¹

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Sound Sterile: Making Scientific Field Recordings in Ornithology

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Trading twitter: Amateur recorders and economies of scientific exchange at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds

Trading twitter: Amateur recorders and economies of scientific exchange at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds

Sonic skills in cultural contexts: theories, practices and materialities of listening

Sound science: recording and listening in the biology of bird song, 1880-1980

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