[birdky] Aldo Leopold soundscape
- From: HapC1@xxxxxxx
- To: birdky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:20:22 -0400 (EDT)
Andy Radomski shared the following with me and I wanted to pass it along.
It was great to listen to the soundscape and visualize Leopold sitting
listening to the chorus of birds.
Hap
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
9/18/12
NOTE: To listen to the soundscape, visit _http://www.news.wisc.edu/21058_
(http://www.news.wisc.edu/21058)
CONTACT: Stanley Temple (608) 263-6827, _satemple@xxxxxxxxx
(mailto:satemple@xxxxxxxx)
ALDO LEOPOLD'S FIELD NOTES SCORE A LOST SOUNDSCAPE
MADISON - Among his many qualities, the pioneering wildlife ecologist Aldo
Leopold was a meticulous taker of field notes.
Rising before daylight and perched on a bench at his Sauk County shack in
Depression-era Wisconsin, Leopold routinely took notes on the dawn chorus
of birds. Beginning with the first pre-dawn calls of the indigo bunting or
robin, Leopold would jot down in tidy script the bird songs he heard, when
he heard them, and details such as the light level when they first sang. He
also mapped the territories of the birds near his shack, so he knew where
the songs originated.
Lacking a tape recorder, the detailed written record was the best the
iconic naturalist could do.
"Leopold took amazing field notes," says Stan Temple, a University of
Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of wildlife ecology and now a senior
fellow of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. "He recorded his observations of nature
in great detail."
Using those notes, Temple and Christopher Bocast, a UW-Madison Nelson
Institute graduate student and acoustic ecologist, have recreated a
"soundscape" from Leopold's 70 year-old notes. But the dawn chorus that
Leopold heard
in1940 no longer exists at the shack, Temple explains. The mix of species
today is different due to changes in the landscape and changes in the bird
community around the shack.
More noticeable is the thrum of the nearby interstate highway, audible at
every hour from Leopold's storied sanctuary, and the other constant and
varied noises of the human animal. Since Leopold's time, for example, the
internal combustion engine has roared to soundscape dominance, whether as an
airplane overhead, a rumbling motorcycle, a whining chain saw or an outboard
churning on the nearby Wisconsin River.
"The difference between 1940 and 2012 is overwhelmingly the anthrophony -
human-generated noise," explains Temple. "That's the big change. In
Leopold's day there was much less of that."
The resurrected soundscape of 1940s Sauk County is the first to be
recreated from actual data rather than someone's imagination of what the past
sounded like, says Temple. The work fits into an emerging field of science
known as soundscape ecology, which seeks to explain the role of sound within a
landscape and how it influences the animals - birds, insects, amphibians,
even fish - that live there.
Recently, a rarefied group of scholars who work in the new field met at
the Leopold Center, just a few hundred yards from Leopold's humble shack. The
National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop drew not only scientists
but philosophers, musicians and others with an interest in natural sounds.
Temple gave the opening keynote, which featured the reconstructed dawn chorus.
"Aldo Leopold recognized that you can get a pretty good sense of land
health by listening to the soundscape," Temple says. "If sounds are missing
and
things are there that shouldn't be, it often indicates underlying
ecological problems."
The soundscape produced by Temple and Bocast is a compressed version of
the chorus described by Leopold, taking 30 minutes of notes and compressing
them into five minutes of recording. Bird songs and calls were obtained from
the extensive collection housed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's
Macaulay Library.
The background sound on which they superimposed the bird songs is all
Wisconsin, but Temple and Bocast struggled to find a place where human noise
was as it would have been in Leopold's time: "There are combustion engines on
the edge of hearing all the time," says Bocast, whose dissertation work
includes a bioacoustic study low frequency sounds made by spawning sturgeon.
Citing a recent study, Temple points out that in the lower 48 states,
there is no place more than 35 kilometers from the nearest road, making it
nearly impossible to tune out the hum of human activity, even in places
designated as wilderness. "It is increasingly difficult to study natural
soundscapes that represent normality," says Temple, noting that its not just
mechanical human noise that's encroaching. The rain forests of Hawaii, for
example, no longer sound like the rain forests of Hawaii. "They sound more like
the rain forests of Puerto Rico because the calls of an introduced, invasive
tree frog are becoming pervasive."
Preserving the natural sounds of a place, avers Temple, may be just as
challenging as conserving the mosaic of plants and animals that help keep an
ecosystem intact. Like smell and sight, "sound can be what you associate
with a particular landscape," something Leopold appreciated and wrote about in
several of his well known essays.
By noting and studying the role of sound in the natural world, Leopold
proved again to be ahead of his time. Science is only now coming to grips with
the totality of the sounds of nature (much like the sound of an entire
orchestra) rather than the individual components of the soundscape, according
to Temple.
Understanding how nature's "music" is changing and how much attention we
need to pay to the sounds introduced by people, he says, are challenges for
soundscape ecologists. And we have much to learn about what the noise
people make does to the environment.
###
- Terry Devitt (608) 262-8282, _trdevitt@xxxxxxxxx
(mailto:trdevitt@xxxxxxxx)
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