快猫短视频

THE CELEBRATED American biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas once argued that
music-making is part of our biological inheritance. We share the urge with the
spiders that tap out a mating dance as much as with 鈥渢he timpani of gorilla
breasts鈥�. Perhaps the Brandenburg Concertos and a frog鈥檚 croaks both recall a
primitive memory of the first 鈥渋mprobable, ordered dance of living forms鈥�.

A mite mystical, maybe. But consider our fascination with natural sounds. The
moment recording technologies were developed, just over a century ago, animal
voices shot to the fore.

In 1900 Cherry Kearton, a British pioneer, was the first to capture the
sounds of any wild creature on a wax cylinder, faithfully duplicating a
nightingale鈥檚 arresting array of trills and shrieks. A few decades on, Arthur
Allen of Cornell University used cine films to make 1600 recordings of birds,
which formed the core of the world鈥檚 first library of natural sounds. It wasn鈥檛
easy. To track down a great prize, the rare ivory-billed woodpecker, he and his
pals once hired a team of mules to haul 700 kilograms of equipment deep into a
Louisiana swamp.

Just months after fleeing Nazi Germany, another pioneer, Ludwig Koch, began
amassing snatches of British birdsong鈥攁ll from the back of a recording
van. In the 1940s, armed with the new magnetic tape machines, recordists set
sail for Gotland to record guillemots, or took to canoes to capture the call of
the loon.

But travel was expensive. The great Danish recordist Carl Weismann, desperate
to raise funds for an expedition to New Zealand, cycled round Copenhagen
recording the sounds of barking dogs and wove the soundbites together to the
tune 鈥淢y bonnie lies over the ocean鈥�. At first, few were wooed by his canine
concoction, but the breakthrough came when a woman played his recording in her
flat where dogs were strictly prohibited. Neighbours complained, the police were
called, and the story hit the headlines鈥攋ust the publicity he needed.

Today all you need to tinker with a dog鈥檚 yaps is a synthesiser. But if
technological challenges have largely disappeared from bioacoustics, real
excitement remains鈥攏ot least because we still have no idea what most of
the world鈥檚 species sound like.

The world鈥檚 most comprehensive collection forms the wildlife section of
Britain鈥檚 National Sound Archive. The collection has amassed some 120 000
recordings since it began in 1969. Most of the world鈥檚 birds are on tape: 7500
species out of around 9500 worldwide. There are only 650 soundbites of
insects鈥攁 tiny proportion of the many tens of thousands of species that
must make some kind of noise.

And no wonder. Armed with good recordings, researchers are now adapting human
voice recognition technologies to track the signature tunes of individual whales
as they navigate the oceans. Who knows, one day we may even converse with
animals by playing back recordings tailored to respond to what they are
saying.