S4E4: Sound Archives with Cheryl Tipp

In this episode Claudia talks to Cheryl Tipp about sound archives, how they are managed and the ways in which animal studies scholars might use them in trying to research animals. Together they think about why some sounds are included in national archives more than others as well as how recordings of nature and animal voices are valued. 

Date Recorded: 1 December 2021

Cheryl Tipp is the British Library’s Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds. With a background in zoology and library services, Cheryl has spent the past 16 years looking after the Library’s world-renowned collection of 300,000 species and habitat recordings. She has worked extensively on projects that encourage the creative reuse of archival content, from student videogames to short films from emerging filmmakers, and has written widely on the history of wildlife sound recording. Connect with Cheryl on Twitter (@CherylTipp). 

Featured: 

Environment and Sound Archiveat the British Library; Grey Wolfby Tom Cosburn; Haddock by A.D. Hawkins;  Animal Language: How Animals Communicate by Julian Huxley, The Sound and Vision Blog, The Zooniverse Project; Wildlife Sound Recording Society; Seaspiracy; What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe;

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

This is another eye roar podcast.

SPEAKER_02: 0:04

Like in the days when people used to do CDs and things like that, you would see that if it was a spoken word publication, oh, you know, the the fees that would be paid to the recordists, for example, because it's a commercial project, the fees would be, you know, large because they say, Oh, well, you know, someone's taken all their time, they've created this, they've thought about this, all this work has gone into it. And then that we would they would do something similar with wildlife. They'd be like, oh, well, it's just you know, it's just a fox. I mean, you know, it's not the same. And yet they they forget that the recordist has maybe had to have spent years planning this recording.

SPEAKER_05: 0:44

Welcome back to the Animal Turn, everyone. This is season four where we're focusing in on animals and sound. Now, straight away, I just wanted to say a huge sorry for this episode coming out a bit late. Um, I know you didn't get anything in December. Things have been a little bit bonkers. Uh, so I know I shouldn't be giving you excuses, but I'm going to give you a couple of excuses. One, uh, I've run into some immigration issues myself, so my personal life has been slightly topsy-turvy. So that's kind of thrown me a couple of curveballs, but I kind of got back on track and I was like, yeah, I'm getting these episodes done. And you know, sometimes you'll have several things going on and they'll be seamless. You're like, this one goes well, this one goes well, this one goes well. But there's always one where, you know, no matter how hard you try, just several things seem to go wrong. And unfortunately with Cheryl, we were just running into hurdle after hurdle. So first came kind of just challenges with setting up the time. Um, my immigration issues meant that I was now dealing with different time zones and um and staying in my sister's place where she's got uh two kids and several animals, trying to find a quiet time of day to do these interviews was proving challenging. So I ended up changing my interview times with Cheryl several times, which made me feel quite unprofessional. And then eventually we met, which was fantastic, and we had such a good conversation. Oh my goodness. Cheryl is just a wonderful, uh, wonderful human and really generous with what she was uh giving and saying. Uh, only to finish the interview, and something went horribly wrong with my technical stuff, and all of my sound was just gone. So I spent, you know, like two weeks trying to figure out how to get that sound back and if it was possible, and you know, speaking to my provider and seeing what was possible. And unfortunately, the the long and short of it was the sound was just gone, and I needed to figure out what to do. So do I speak to Cheryl again or do I try to see uh if I could make something of the recording? And actually, what I've done now is I went back and I listened to the recording and I asked the questions again. And this means that it's not as flowy or as uh interactive as my interviews normally are. My interviews are not um, you know, pre-structured. I don't have set questions uh that I have organized beforehand, you know, with the exception of the quotes and stuff. So it's a free-flowing conversation, which makes kind of reenacting it a little bit difficult. But I gave it a try and I actually think it's come off fairly well. And I think there's something interesting in having done this. So we're talking a lot about sound in the season and kind of the manufacturing of sound and and you know, sound versus reality. And this comes up a lot in the interview with Cheryl. So, in an interesting and bizarre twist, uh kind of having my sound conch out has been really fascinating because I've recreated our interview to some extent. Uh, and and this says something about kind of how sound is made. So it's it's not going to be as flowy as, but I actually think it's come off fairly well. And a lot of what Cheryl says is really fascinating when thinking about sound archives and the longevity of sound and how archives and history could be used for animal researchers to better understand animals. And I didn't want to lose that, so I made do with what I had, and it's actually really okay. It's good. So let me tell you a bit about Cheryl. Cheryl Tip is the British Library Curator for the Wildlife and Environmental Sounds with a background in zoology and library services. Cheryl has spent the past 16 years looking after the library's world-renowned collection of 300,000 species and habitat recordings. She has worked extensively on projects that encourage the creative reuse of archival content, everything from student video games to short films from emerging filmmakers, and she's written wildly on the history of wildlife sound recording as well. She's really fun to talk to, um, and she's a wealth of knowledge, as you'll hear in this interview today. And as someone who works in archives and with historical documents, this was really, really important for me, I think, in terms of thinking about what different types of material are available. And I've said it before, I think if you're working with animal studies uh and animal-related content, paying attention to archives and some of the historical details related to them is really important and fascinating. But that's enough blabber for me. Uh I want to say right now, happy 2022 to everyone. 2022 is going to be a good year. I can feel it. Um, I feel it in my bones. So I hope you all had a really great end to 2021 and a beautiful beginning to 2022. And sorry once again for the delay in getting this to you. Uh, I hope you understand and I hope that it comes together well. I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on this episode as well as the rest of the season. So feel free to leave a review. But that's enough. Okay, let's get to the show. Hi, Cheryl. Hi, Cheryl, welcome to the Animal Time Podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. Um yeah, this has been a bit of a run-around getting this this interview uh set up. I I thank you for dealing with all my numerous emails and for being so gracious with being here today because we've got really different timelines happening at the moment. Uh, it's it's 5 a.m. for me. And uh oh god, no, but it's actually really great. I feel much better about this because uh uh I realized that I needed to get up really early uh because there's a lot going on in the house here. Um I'm staying over at my sister's at the moment, and there are kids and animals, and this time of the morning everything is really, really quiet, which is fantastic. So it it just kind of helps me to keep things a bit in check and to keep things quiet, which is well, yeah, it's good for me. It works for me.

SPEAKER_02: 6:25

Wow, well, thank you. God, I didn't realise it was 5 a.m. I'm lucky I've like had my lunch, you know, and it's 1 p.m. here and I'm just like, oh, this is great, but God.

SPEAKER_05: 6:34

I actually really enjoy the mornings. Uh I I wake up early anyway, so so don't even worry about it. I'm a morning person for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 6:41

But you you'd make you'd make a really good wildlife sound recordist. If you can get up at 3 a.m., this is the time that they get up. So you could start a new hobby.

SPEAKER_05: 6:49

Uh that's a great idea. Um, maybe I should just get out there and and do it. Um, I would completely love, I love um, you know, morning hikes and doing that kind of stuff. So uh that sounds that sounds amazing actually. Uh so before we get into the focus of today's episode, which is going to be on sound archives, uh perhaps we could start with talking a little bit about you and uh some of the work that you do.

SPEAKER_02: 7:15

Sure. So my name is Cheryl Tip and I'm curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds at the British Library. Um, I've been in that role now for 16 years, I think. So, yeah, it must be about 16 years. And I have responsibility for looking after the recordings that we have in the archive in the wildlife section of the sound archive, because it's a much broader sound archive than just wildlife and environmental sounds. You know, we cover music and spoken word um and drama and literature and things like that. But I look after the wildlife material. And so currently we have about 300,000 wildlife and environmental sounds that are catalogued. So they've been in the collection for a while, been digitized, catalogued, or some of them are born digital, but then I'm also looking to expand on the archive as well. So it's it's it's very much a live-in archive, it's not something that's kind of um fixed, you know, and we're just working through it and then it will be job done, and that's it. It's it's constantly I look like I've got some tapes coming tomorrow, hopefully, some quarter-inch tapes coming from someone, you know. So we've just digitized a load of quarter-inch tapes and we've now got another hundred coming. So it's it's yeah, it's it's constantly, it's constantly doing that. So I'm looking after the material we have, the material trying to get new material, and then also working on things like the access and interpretation, and yeah, it's a very, very broad role, really, which is good because it's not boring.

SPEAKER_05: 8:40

Well, uh, clearly I chose the right person to talk to then today about sound archives, because you're yeah, I mean, I spent some time in the archives uh the other day, and it's incredible. I was I was genuinely flabbergasted about how much there is uh and and how fun it is to listen to some of these different uh sound recordings. Um yeah, so how how did you how did you come to work uh in the sound archives? Is this something you studied? Uh and why the why the focus on wildlife recordings?

SPEAKER_02: 9:08

Well, my first degree was in zoology. So I've always loved natural history. Um I never thought I would end up working somewhere like this. I didn't think I'd end up working with sound because I was more interested in um sort of population biology, surveying and things like that. And so I did my my um bachelor's degree, and then I didn't want to go further into research because I just wanted to get a job and get some money because I was tired of having some money. Yeah. So I thought just I'll have a break and I'll go and get a job. Um, and so I worked in um a public library for a while, and I I didn't want to stay there um because I thought I'd just have it as a break. And then a job came up in the wildlife section in the sound archive that a friend of mine saw, and it it combined you needed the do the background in zoology and the interest in natural history. I know that that was a tick. And then the experience of working in a library, and I was like, Well, I'm doing that, and I've got this degree. So I I applied for it, and I'd been going through applying for different institutions in London, you know, like Natural History Museum, other ones, and I was getting nowhere. And I thought, oh, the British Library, they're not gonna take me, I don't have the experience, it's not gonna work. So I applied and I got an interview, but I thought, I'm never gonna get this. So I went in and I was so relaxed because I thought, I'm not gonna get it. And so there's no nerves or anything, and then I didn't hear anything, and I thought, oh, that's it, you know, I'll chalk it up to experience. And then they they called and was like, Do you we'd like to offer you the job? Oh god, what what did I lie? What did I say in this thing? I just I just thought this was never gonna happen. So yeah, that's I started just as like the um assistant, really, to the curator, just doing like the admin, doing some cataloging, doing things like that. But then the the curator at the time, she left about six weeks after I'd joined, quite suddenly, you know, she just she just went. And I'd only learn in sort of um as and when needed, you know. It wasn't she wasn't preparing me to take over, she just as and when I needed to know things, and then she went, and I was like, Oh my god, I don't like I I've had six weeks experience. I'm now managing this massive section. And I was just so it's either what do I what do I do? You know, do I can can I do this or can I can I not? Do I need can I cope with this? Um, and there was a point where I was thinking, I can't I can't do this, it's too much pressure, you know. A national sound archive, I didn't know what I was doing. It's this very small section in terms of staff. It was literally just like me, and I was I just and like my first big job, you know, and I thought I'm not sure I can do this. But then there was a point, I was like, Yes, you can, you can do this. Come on, you've good degree, you've got you can do this. And so I was like, yeah, give myself a pep talk. And then, yeah, so it's 16 years later, so I survived.

SPEAKER_05: 11:55

Wow, that's amazing. That's really uh yeah, that's really amazing. And I think it's a solid testament to showing how uh if you see an opportunity and you're interested in it, uh, just try. I think so often we come across opportunities, whether it's for scholarships or for you know things we we want to do, um, and we think, oh, that sounds amazing, but I'm I'm just not good enough or qualified enough. And we kind of exclude ourselves from the running before we've even tried, right?

SPEAKER_02: 12:21

Exactly. I mean, and my I hadn't done any bioacoustics at university, not really. I was like I said, I was focused on population biology, I really liked evolution. Um, I didn't do any sound work. So the only sounds that I could recognise were ones that I knew anyway, because of just my interest in natural history, but I didn't study it. And then I'm having to work, you know, with researchers all over the world who are proper bioacousticians, and you know, I'm feeling that's such a fraud sitting there thinking, I I couldn't even pronounce some of the bird names, you know, because I just wasn't familiar with them. So I've I literally it's like a baptism of fire. It was just I had to learn so quickly.

SPEAKER_05: 12:57

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. And I and I think a lot of people could probably relate to those kind of feelings of imposter syndrome, but chances are you actually brought a lot uh there, you know, in in your in your not knowing, you were probably asking really interesting questions. And what a great way to learn. Like what a great way to learn from from some of the greats uh about um yeah, about animals. What are some of the early recordings that you you came across uh and sounds that kind of uh surprised you?

SPEAKER_02: 13:27

I remember um one of the, yeah, one of them, which was the sound of a haddock. So the swim bladder of a haddock, the sound it made in water. And I didn't know that fish made sounds, you know, and someone said, Oh, there's you've got this recording to look after, it's a recording of uh a male haddock. And I was listening to this, I was thinking, this can't, this can't be, this can't be right. And I listened to it and it was just it just blew my mind, you know, because it's such a strange sound. And number one, I didn't know that fish made sounds, and then listening to it as well, it sounds like a like a motorboat revving up, or like an engine revving up, and so I thought this is insane. And then then I started to think, well, what other strange sounds are there in the archive, you know. So I went off on this little journey trying to explore all these different sounds because we did have some online at that time, so that was a good way to introduce myself to the collection just by listening to our online content at the time. And yeah, you found these strange birds from South America, from Costa Rica, and then these strange um underwater sounds as well, like the sound of a walrus using its uh the vocal sack that it has in its throat, and all these all these really strange sounds. And I think that's what really I don't know, made me maybe more intrigued by it than perhaps I was at the start, you know, because I was so sort of like, I don't know what that was.

SPEAKER_05: 14:56

Yeah, uh yeah, fish, fish and sounds are really amazing and incredible. Uh, I had never really, I think, given much thought to fish at all, really, until I started engaging with some of some of Jonathan Balcombe's work. And then, you know, you start watching things like Sea Spiracy, and you just realize that there's there's so much to see and and understand with the world and and fish and sound. I mean, some of the things that Jonathan was talking about, uh, the sounds that fish make, because they don't have ears, which I didn't know. Uh, but then they also just because they don't hear in that way, doesn't mean that they don't use sound and interact with sound, right? So he's speaking about like electromagnetic pulses and farts and vibrations.

SPEAKER_02: 15:33

Yeah, yeah, it was it was this the variety of sounds that fish can make. Well may I've said that wrong. I mean I don't mean they have a wide vocabulary per species. I mean there's so many different kinds of fish that can make sounds, and I have I only have a fraction of these in the sound archive or in the collection that I look after. So, you know, there's a there's a I've certainly got gaps in in my collection where I need to fill them. So fish recordings, sounds of fish, underwater sounds in particular, and then you come into the whole area of anthropogenic noise and all of these things. So, you know, it's not a it's not a fit, it's not a um finished archive. You know, I don't have all the species in the world. There's so much more that's that's that's needed to come into the archive.

SPEAKER_05: 16:16

Yeah, I mean, I think this speaks to some of what we've spoken about in the past with regards to fish and how sometimes fish aren't viewed or or valued in kind of the same way as some other uh land animals, and perhaps that's because of where we are. Um, but you know, as I as I mentioned earlier, I spent some time on the archives and they are fascinating. There is so much there, and of course, there's there's a lot to be added. But what was really interesting for me, and this is uh probably as a result of my own research interests, is what was not in the archives. Uh kind of the absolute absence, I think, of domesticated animals, uh, of cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats. That was really uh surprising to me that there weren't more recordings related to these uh these types of animals. Um but yeah, well why why is that? Why do you think there are so few of these animals in in these archives?

SPEAKER_02: 17:06

They they should be there. They really should. Historically, we're focused on the more well the the wildlife, you know, the wild sounds, um wild animals. But there is a lot of research going into the sounds that domesticated animals make as well, and the emotional um context of those sounds. Um, I think also you uh you you don't like you we don't have many dogs barking, or you know, the big dogs, or cats, we don't have many cats or any or rabbits, you know, these kind of domesticated animals that we we don't have in the archive, and that does put also come down to the fact that we receive donations from recordists, you know, we don't we don't commission people to make recordings, we we very much rely on donations coming in, and people don't tend to record domesticated animals because they think they're boring, they think they're familiar, they think the archive would be full of these sounds. So they want to go out and get you know the the wild the wild sounds or the more not exotic, but you know, the more the the different kind of sounds that you can get, but they don't want to record the cat that's sitting on their lap, you know, or the dog that's running around like a maniac with its ball. It's we don't have those recordings, and I was tempted at one point to do some kind of call out, you know, and say to people, record the sounds of your pets or go to the farm or or do these kinds of other domesticated sounds. Um I haven't got around to doing that yet, because I'm just trying to work like the logistics.

SPEAKER_05: 18:31

Yeah, um yeah, you you mentioned uh dogs there, and uh I definitely think I came across sounds of a pair of dogs and they were fighting or playing or something like that, which was really interesting to hear. Um but yeah, it really is interesting to think about what recordings are included uh versus those that are excluded, right? Um because there is a there is a power dynamic there. There's something there in terms of how different voices and different sounds are valued, uh, you know, wildlife being valued versus domesticated animals being valued, uh, whose whose voices are even worth being recorded, uh, whose voices are worth being, you know, noted or indexed, for example. Yeah, so I I don't know. That's just to me, it it says something. The the fact that domesticated animals aren't in these archives is really fascinating and tells us uh something about how animals are valued.

SPEAKER_02: 19:21

Oh no, I completely see what you mean, completely. The approach that I take, and I think also um my fellow curatorial colleagues as well, where it's not we see it as it's not our place to decide what content should be coming in in terms of its context or its meaning. We decide, I mean, it has to fall into our collecting remit. So for me, wildlife and environmental sounds from all over the world, it's as broad as that. The criteria I place on what comes into the archive. I mean, I don't look at say, say if someone sent in a bunch of British recordings and I say, Oh, I've got enough of those, you know, I don't I don't want these, or maybe from a part of the world where I think no one's interested in that. I don't make those kinds of decisions, it's based on on the format. So the only time I would probably turn down a collection would be if it was common species that we have a lot of, but the quality is really, really bad. Do you see what I mean? So, because I'm thinking about the longevity of the recordings and how they can be reused. So, from an archival point of view, and if they're really, really bad quality, look at this, look at the cat. That's Felix. Yes, perfect. Can you can you come to a microphone and make a sound for me? Um, it comes down to format, so uh you know we have to think about how much it costs as well to archive all of these sounds to look after them to make sure they're properly migrated if they need to be to new systems. And we don't want to kind of clog up the archive with content that is of limited use, if that makes sense. So if I have a really poor recording of a of a blackbird, for example, and it's five miles in the distance and it's drowned out by cars and it's an MP3, you know, the the the Yeah, there's I mean there's a lot that goes into I think managing sound and thinking about what sound is valued, both in terms of uh, you know, its quality.

SPEAKER_05: 21:12

Um, but I guess I think what I'm trying to ask here is also the the comp yeah, like there's a lot involved uh in the complexity of what's needed to record sound and keep sound and create an archive. But I think I think what I was trying to get to here is also thinking about you know, even what sounds the researchers themselves are submitting to you, you know. So guaranteed, I think if if I was a researcher and I had a microphone and I was learning how to record uh or I was creating an archive, I think I would probably start with recording sounds around me, right? The sounds of my dog eating kibble or a cat purring or uh, you know, the fence opening and closing. Uh but yet that I don't know, that for me there's something interesting in the fact that people surely people have these recordings, but they're not something that they're submitting to you in the archive in the first place. And that to me says there's again something interesting going on here in terms of how different animals are are valued. And and and I don't know, maybe it's because we just don't value the things that are around us and we think, ugh, you know, it's just a normal everyday thing.

SPEAKER_02: 22:12

Yes, no, it does. I mean, people record us when they the recordings that they're sending in to us, sometimes sometimes they'll they'll they'll they'll come to me and say, Oh, you know, sorry, it's only say if they're British recorders, they'll come to me, sorry, it's only British material this time. You know, because it's so familiar to us, and yes, I do have a lot in the archive, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I don't want more, or the content that they're giving us is not of use. Because if you think about certain things like um song development in birds, particularly ones that do we mimic that mimic, you know, learn learn their songs um and pick up sounds from the environment and include those into their songs, in terms of say song change over time, or whether a species remains in an area or whether it disappears, you know, because of I don't know, climate change or habitat loss or things like that. So even the the sounds which are to some people more mundane or common or everyday, sometimes recorders won't want to submit them because they think they're boring or we've got too many, but they do they do have a place. Everything like that has a place. It's the same with you know, they won't record their cats or their dogs or their hamsters or whatever, because they're like, oh, no one wants that. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna wait till I go abroad and then I'm gonna make these recordings, you know, in a in a rainforest.

SPEAKER_05: 23:26

I think it's a it's a common thing, you know. You you live in a city and you don't go and visit your own tourist sites or the things that you have just around your corner, but you you stay abroad for a year and all of a sudden you make sure that you go everywhere and you see everything. Um yeah, you just don't kind of value what's near you or what you see uh as common and regular, which is which is surprising and a shame. Maybe we all need to uh figure out how to value what's around us a bit more and a bit better. Um but yeah, so this is really interesting, and it kind of gets me thinking about uh what kind of recordings you do have as well and and what people have always been recording. So, what what's the the oldest recording in the archives?

SPEAKER_02: 24:04

Well, I know the old the oldest sound recording we have is from 1910, but it's not from a commercial record, so it was made, you know, indoor indoors um in Germany. But the oldest ones out in the field they'd be from the 1950s, unpublished ones, they would come from the 1950s. And you know, we've been able to work with scientists who are looking at um like changes over time in in vocalizations. So they they might look at um, I don't know, I always say the blackbird and the nightingale or the skylark or changes in song over time, or looking at looking for patterns that suggest accents in birds as well. So if you look at, say, for us, you've got the European wren, and they have different, slightly different songs, or say a slightly different accent depending on where they come from. But you need a large body of a large corpus of recordings to test that theory, you know, if you think they're gonna have accents. You need a large body of work to test, but it needs to be large, um, but it also needs to be it needs to cover a range of years. You know, you need to have the sort of historical aspect of the world to see, because maybe you can see then when the changes started to happen, you know, because it would take time, obviously, for changes to happen. So you need to have the historical content, but you also need to have a wide variety of content for your statistics to work.

SPEAKER_05: 25:27

Yeah, I mean, I guess that's so important. So we think, oh, okay, you've already got this recording of this animal, but actually it's important to have those recordings of those animals over time. Uh and this is what you know Brian Pajanowski was kind of showing us when recording the dawn chorus or recording the same chorus in the same place, time and again. It kind of just shows how the um the soundscape has changed over time. And if you're recording the same place.

SPEAKER_02: 25:51

Yep, exactly. So, and also if you have places, um, I mean, we we don't tend to have this kind of material. People do ask, but they want to, they're interested in whether we have, say, say, for a particular woodland or particular habitat, do we have historical recordings coming up to the present so they can listen to the sounds and see whether species are, you know, all the species are still there or whether species have disappeared. Um, so I mean that would be very interesting to do, some kind of like monitoring program where you go to the same place every year at the same time every year and record a durational piece and then see what's changed, you know.

SPEAKER_05: 26:30

That would be interesting, and also to go in like different seasons because these sounds change at different seasons and different times of day. Um, you know, it's been these are things I've never thought of before, but it's really been fascinating to think through this uh during the season. And yeah, and then it starts to make me think about how how to even manage something like this, right? Like making these sounds, recording these sounds. Yeah. How does if someone wants to start using sound or thinking about sound or creating their own archive, like of a woodland or whatever, how how does someone go about creating their own archive? Um, you know, what kind of advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_02: 27:04

I think I mean it's very um cost-heavy to set up an archive, you know, and there's a there's a lot of issues around doing it. But certainly if you're working, if you're making recordings and you're this is part of your your research, or this is this is like your your work in life, yes, you should you could you could set up your own mini archive in a sense, you know, your own personal archive or uh a departmental archive. And there's a lot of advice out there on how on how to do these things, you know. There's international associations of sound archives where you can become a member of that, and that will help explain what you need to do if you have tapes or uh obsolete formats or and things like you know, your metadata, just making sure you you capture all the information you need. Because if the recordings are just standalone and don't have any contextual information, there's they're they're limited in their use. Do you know what I mean? Because it's um right, I've got a recording of um a common frog, perfect, but I don't know you know when it was recorded, where it was recorded, what time of year it was recorded, I have what was it recorded on. You know, if you have that information, it makes everything so much richer and so much more reusable. So people always it tend there tends to be a sort of forgetting of the the metadata that would go along with it and the capturing of that and getting that all organized as well. So that's a very important from for us, that's that's that's crucial to having a to having a to setting up an archive.

SPEAKER_05: 28:34

Yeah, so so that's really important. So you know, if you're trying to manage the bigger data instead of seek out another organization to help you do that, but at the same time, when you're actually collecting your data to be cognizant of those important things, like where you're taking it, uh what kind of sound it is, what what it's recorded on. Um and yeah, this is really interesting for me because I've I've tended to focus overwhelmingly on textual documents and not to think about the senses. And and I mean, even with my textual documents, I need to pay attention to where they've come from and how they've been uh curated. And yeah, I don't know, there's just something really interesting to think about animals and sound and how it's recorded in this way, and and yeah, like how animals have shaped history and and and have history, right? Like how sound can help us understand animal history, I think, is really uh important.

SPEAKER_02: 29:23

Yes, very much, very much. And there was um the pioneer wildlife sound recordist, Ludwig Koch, he said exactly that thing. He said that, you know, we're so used to using our eyes to learn about things, you know, the the the sound is always like takes second place to the visuals, you know, and he would always encourage people through his radio broadcasts and through his writing to try and just stop for a minute and just focus on the sound because you can learn so much from the sound itself and it can do so much for you. But yeah, we we do we do and we yeah, we we do this in at the library, we try and um through events and things like that. Just show how much you can get from just the sound. You know, you don't need to be looking at images at the same time or doing something else and just having the sound seen as a secondary thing. You know, the sound, just even if we just all get together, we do an event where everyone just sits in a room and the lights go down, you've got no other distractions, and you just play the sounds for 40 minutes, maybe 50 minutes, and and yeah, it's interesting to see what a response or what effect it can have on people, just just with no other distractions, you know, just listening to the sound.

SPEAKER_05: 30:32

I remember years ago walking past a place that had uh a restaurant, and you could go into this restaurant and they would switch off all the lights and you would sit in and you would eat your food, and someone would bring the food, I think they had like special goggles on, and they'd bring the food to you and you would eat it, and you wouldn't have your sight to figure out what you were eating. You would just have your sense of like touch and smell and taste. And it's just it's interesting to think about how differently attuned your your senses are when you're when when you you disavow your sight for a bit.

SPEAKER_02: 31:01

Yeah, it does, it does. Because otherwise, you even if you are listening to something, you're looking around, you're never just you know vacantly staring at something. You are you're looking around, you're and then something, you'll see something, and it'll trigger something in your mind. So you'll go off course a little bit, you know, whereas if your eyes are shut, you you just you just have to listen to or if you're in the dark or something, this is where it was in the dark radio was we used to collaborate with this organization doing listening events in the library, and yeah, that's it would just be it, you turn lights down so that you're not going to damage yourself, you know, if you have to go um to the to the toilet or something during a break. You can still see where you're it's not completely pitch black, but it's uh yeah, there's there's not a lot of um distractions.

SPEAKER_05: 31:42

I think something definitely does happen. Uh, you know, this makes me think a little bit about Mickey Valley with what he was talking about with his master's voice, when he speaks about the dog leaning in, and you kind of see the dog leaning in. And what is what does it mean to lean into the sound, to really pay attention to sound, to to not pay attention to your your um your visuals? I I think that's really fascinating. So so this idea of leaning in and listening makes me think about archives. We've spoken a bit about why they're important in terms of understanding animals over time. How could researchers who are interested in animal studies and have kind of a keen focus on animals or different animal populations uh use archives? Why why should archives uh be a place that researchers consult if they're interested in animals?

SPEAKER_02: 32:34

Well, I think it depends on what they're studying. But if you're looking at, say for example, if you're looking at taxonomy and you you have a suspicion that the way a current group of birds um is classified is incorrect, you know, you need there's three different things that you'll need to look at. You need to look at their um uh the sort the sound, the sounds that they make, their morphology, where they occur, and their DNA. So you combine all of these different aspects together and use those four different um criteria, I suppose, to see whether or not the original classification is correct. Now you're not if if you're looking at a massive group of birds with a wide range, you're not going to be able to go out yourself and make all of the recordings that you're gonna need for your research. So if you can go to an archive where other people have have done the work for you in a sense, and you have all the metadata that says whether birds were recorded, what time of day, who recorded it, when, you've got all of that information that you can then run your analyses on and combine that with your other data that you're collecting, and then you know, look at it to see whether or not the birds are actually classified in the right way, or whether there is a previously unknown species within that group of birds that people didn't know about before because they weren't looking at the DNA, for example, that's a relatively new tool, you know, uh tool.

SPEAKER_03: 33:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 34:00

And you combine all of these things together. So it does depend on what the researchers are looking at, but certainly we have been able to help with a lot of taxonomic research that has gone on over the past 20 years, probably, where birds have been reclassified thanks to recordings that are held within archives. Interesting. So that's just one example of why researchers might want to come to archives. And also, I mean, it's not just researchers as well, it's it's other people that are trying to make a point, whether it's through education, um, you know, teaching children, there's all these different ways in which our archive is used and can be used, um, which which means that we want to have as big an archive as possible because we're never really sure what people are going to want to do with the archive, even like now or in the future. So to have as wide a collection as possible, which is why we're not too subjective when it comes to accepting material, because we never know what people are going to want in the future. So we try to keep it as broad as possible so that and catalogue it as quickly as possible and as well as possible so that people can go to the catalogue and find what they want and then you know access access the content.

SPEAKER_05: 35:09

And how easy is it to kind of use these sounds? So let's say I am interested in um maybe understanding the relationships of specific animals or how humans relate to them. Um and perhaps that's also something we could talk a bit about is the the absence of humans in some of these uh these recordings. Um but how how accessible is this? So I I go to the British Library of Sounds. Um, how easy is it for me to use them? Uh, because this is something I'm I'm almost always filled with with dread in in today's world. I don't want to steal anything from anyone, and sometimes we very easily just right-click, copy, and take. Uh and and this is maybe something to to talk a bit about. Like as a researcher trying to be true to the person who's made it and stuff, um, can I just use these materials? Uh, how do I how do I understand whether I can or can't use the the recording?

SPEAKER_02: 36:03

Yeah, because copyright is a thing that we're very aware of working in a in a sound archive. Um, so when material comes into the archive, we we will ask the recordist how they would like their sounds used. So the the basic would be for research purposes only, you know, because they're still the copyright holder, they made the recording, it's going to be theirs for the next 70 years, or depending on which country you live, what your copyright law is. But they still own the copyright. And I found it quite a lot over the years where people think that just because it's a wildlife sound with no sort of human element within the sound, oh, there's no copyright. You know, you can just use it because it's just, you know, a B or you know, whatever the recording is, but there is still a copyright there. So most of the recordings in the archive are still within copyright. Most of them can be used for research purposes, many of them can be used for non-commercial purposes, and then when you start going into the commercial side of things, that's where we normally have to put people in touch with the copyright holder. But one good thing that is coming, and we've always been because so much of our content was analog, it hadn't been digitized. I mean, we had thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of recordings that hadn't been digitized, making that available on the web was you couldn't do it, you know, because they're locked up in these in these tapes, and it takes a long time to digitize as well, because you do it in real time. So if you've got 8,000 tapes to do and one engineer, it's gonna take a long time. Yeah, so we've just finished well, we're coming towards the end of a five-year digitization project within the library called Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, and one aspect of that is building a much better website so content as much as possible that's cleared can go onto the website and be made available for download under a Creative Commons license. So an open more of an open license and a non-commercial open license. So at least researchers can they can preview the recordings on our website to see whether or not they're suitable for their work. Then they can download the recordings from the website. So it cuts us out in a way. You don't have to wait for, you don't have to wait for us to go down to the basements to get the tapes, to give them to an engineer who's also going to be working on all other kinds of material, wait for, wait for them to digitize, then send them over somehow. You know, it's it'd be a much more immediate thing. Because when we've wanted to do it for a long time anyway, put more content online or make it more available, but we are confined by copyright law.

SPEAKER_05: 38:30

So So is is is historical material I'm guessing the copyright, when you when you've got material from someone who you didn't necessarily speak to, how do you how do you navigate uh copyright? Like is it still under the 70-year rule or yeah, yeah, it would it would be.

SPEAKER_02: 38:49

Um it used to be 50 years, um, but then they extended it certainly in the UK to 70 years. So we don't have much that's in the public domain. It would be some of the very, very early material from some of the commercial discs that we have. So I think anything sort of pre-1950s, it's would be in the public domain. So again, we'll put that online once it's digitized, and it'll be um a as fully open license as you can get, you know, because it's in the public domain. Um and but the other material, yeah, we just have to apply just the standard copyright law.

SPEAKER_05: 39:22

You said something interesting there, though, that people just assume because it's a sound of an animal, there is no copyright. And I think that's there's something fascinating going on under the surface there. And and maybe I'm rooting too much into it. I think people maybe it's part of internet culture, right? Like people right-click and copy pictures online all the time. I think the web kind of gives the illusion of everything is available and everything is um open. So my my husband's a photographer, and this has been something I I've I've learned firsthand. Is like sometimes he'll be online and he'll see his photo on on another person's website, and you know, people just see it and they think, oh, I can I can just take it. Um, you know. And maybe this is something going on with with animal archives and sounds too, is because it's an animal sound, you just think, oh, well, uh, it's an animal sound, so I can just take it.

SPEAKER_02: 40:12

Yep, I agree with you. This is a problem that I, well, not a problem, but this is something that I faced a lot over the years, is that it's almost as if the the wildlife sounds that I look after in some people's eyes, it's almost as if it's like a poor relation to something like you know, music, something more um cultural, some or oral history, or something more um deep and you know meaningful. So you wouldn't you wouldn't dream of um using uh I don't know, like we have a lot of material online, you know. So you've got testimonies from Holocaust survivors, you've got um people who you know have suffered from age, you've got all of these things which are very, very heavy and very, very seen as incredibly important, which they are, of course. But when it comes to the wild, people think, oh, well it's just it's just a bird, you know, I could just use that. It's just a bird. There's no there's it's almost seen as a sort of as a secondary importance to something that's created or has um human content within it, you know, whether it's poetry or I've seen that as well. I've seen it um even you know when when people are um wanting to release something, maybe in the days when people used to do CDs and things like that, you'd see that if it was a spoken word publication, oh you know, the the the fees that would be paid to the recordist, for example, you know, because it's a commercial project, the fees would be you know, large because they say, Oh, well, you know, someone's taken all their time, they've created this, they've thought about this, all this work has gone into it. And then we would they would do something similar with wildlife. They'd be like, Oh, well, it's just you know, it's just a fox. I mean, you know, it's not the same. And yet they they forget that the recordist has maybe had to have spent years planning this recording, you know. So it's it's looking a little bit at the at the recordist rather than the animal. I mean, there are two sides there, but yeah, it's it's as if that it's it's not seen as important, and so it's not as worthy of being treated in the same way as something which is voice-based, you know. So I I've seen that.

SPEAKER_05: 42:10

Yeah, I think I think that's so important. So there are like two different sets of valuations going on there. One, I think, um, you know, uh a lack of an appreciation that these recordings are actually made, they're created, they're not just natural artifacts. Someone has spent time going out, making them, collecting this, yes, uh, these sounds, editing it, uh, you know, working with this podcast, I've learned a great deal of, you know, sound takes time. And and like you mentioned earlier, it might be distorted, uh distorted. Um, so there's a a different valuation of how things are made and curated, and an idea that wildlife sounds are actually made, they're not just natural. Um, but then I think a second valuation going on there about how animals' voices are valued as uh and and commercialized, you know, um, versus other kinds of sounds. So whether it's music or an animal sound, yeah. So I think there are there are two different kinds of uh valuations happening there.

SPEAKER_02: 43:08

Well, exactly, exactly. I mean, the the amount of time and effort and money even that sound recordists will will put into making a recording, and you can't it, you know, it's it's very different. If if you're saying you're recording, I don't know, um, a poet, for example, you set the time, don't you? You set the location, they come with their poem, you push record, they read their poem, they leave. With wildlife, you can't just turn up with your stuff and say, right, I'm ready. Okay, so you can sing for me now, I'm ready. You know, it's so much harder when it comes to wildlife. If you want to capture that meaningful recording or capture some kind of vocabulary, some kind of um call or song that that is quite a rarity, you know, and you've had to wait for a very particular time of year, and you've done three seasons beforehand of just observing, you know, the amount of time and effort that is put into it when it comes to wildlife, it can be easily dismissed as oh, well, it's just a bird, you know, you've just gone out there and recorded. But the effort, it's it's um it's not it's it can be just the same as someone writing a novel, you know, the amount of time that's put into it and effort and thought, and yet it's seen sometimes as being of secondary importance to something that's created.

SPEAKER_05: 44:18

Yeah, that's I mean, that's definitely something I've learned so far in this season, is is that a lot of people who do sound really take it seriously, and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of infrastructure. And it's certainly something that's made, and this has also come up in in several of the interviews so far is kind of the the place of the human in these recordings. So, you know, and I wonder to what extent this you know plays into this is how humans are kind of wiped clean from these recordings. Um, you know, humans are are not really present. You the sound of the jackets or the sound of humans talking, you don't hear that in these natural sound recordings. And I uh yeah, I don't I don't I want to know what you think a bit about that.

SPEAKER_02: 45:02

Yeah, it does. It does. I mean, I understand why, because they're trying to make um, or certainly for say for wildlife sound recorders who are making recordings that they then want to be reused for maybe research or whatever. They want to, they're hiding themselves away because they don't want the birds, or say birds, but whatever animal you're recording to be distracted. So, in the one sense, they're trying to be as as quiet as possible and as hidden as possible because they don't want the they want the bird or the animal to act naturally, you know, so you don't want them run running around or making lots of noise. And also, say say you're going to analyse um the vocalizations, you want it to be as clean as possible. You don't want to hear, you know, like the mic moving, you don't want a big bang in in the middle of it, because you want that clean recording to analyse it properly. But then they do remove themselves from the recording. It's a sort of like sanitizing, you know, so they might stop the recording if there's a plane coming over. So if you're trying to capture an accurate um picture of what's happening, you want to keep the plane in there, you want to keep the horn in there. But then they're at the same time, they still that idea of trying to create, you know, the birth the beautiful, pristine recording of nature, you know, without our involvement, which yeah, it's not um it's not an accurate depiction, is it, of the of the space. But I suppose they're thinking about it what they want, how they want their sounds to be, what's the purpose of their recording and how they want the sounds to be reused in the future. I suppose they think about it like that.

SPEAKER_05: 46:30

Yeah, but I I do think that that's really important, is every time you remove the crinkle of a jacket or the sound of the plane, uh, you you're creating an idea of nature that perhaps doesn't even exist anymore. Uh, you know, this is something that I think documentaries have been critiqued for, is also removing, you know, showing kind of this nature that's pristine and untouched. Um but I, you know, I have to wonder what kind of uh recordings you'd have if humans were kept in that. Because the the the the jacket is crinkling or the the the clicks are happening or the footsteps are happening and they and the planes are happening and they are part of this natural environment and they do change how these birds sound, right? So earlier you spoke about how how vocalizations change. The presence of humans changes those sounds. So maybe just being there is changing how they sound and how they interact with the environment. But by scrubbing ourselves from these um recordings, we don't maybe get that picture. We we we remove ourselves so uh we we lose something there, I think, um, in in understanding what we're actually hearing. And again, this speaks to some of what you were talking about earlier and what's come up time and again is that these are created uh to some extent, but it it does make me think a bit about what's going on here.

SPEAKER_02: 47:48

Interesting what you say. I mean, when it comes, we always encourage people, if they've done longer recordings, we we encourage people not to edit them because maybe there has been a car that goes past and they don't like it, you know, that's ruined their recording, so they may be tempted to edit that out. Whereas we discourage that because we want it in its purest form. And when recordings come into the archive, we don't maybe they're analog and we we're digitizing them. We won't alter anything, we don't chop out parts because you want to keep certainly. So if it's a bird, for example, the spacing in between the different songs, you know, you want that to stay as it should be. So even if you've got a massive bang in the middle of it, you don't edit that out because then that affects the duration between um the strophs, you know. So you want to you want to keep that in. You don't want to edit it. So we do encourage not to, or not to filter your work either, not to filter the recordings because that then has an impact as well if you're trying to analyze, if a researcher is trying to analyse the recordings, don't don't don't touch it. You know, we'll have a master, and that's just as is. And then if you want to use it for publication or radio or whatever, then you can filter, then you can edit. But what comes into the archive, we want it to be like the master, untouched, unedited file or recording. That's what we want.

SPEAKER_05: 49:07

I mean, this was something that came up a lot in the last season on animals in the urban, was just how much, and that's actually what got me interested in in some of having a season on sound, is is how much animals sounds in cities are changing and in and around cities in response to human sounds, right? Because we we make sounds and they get quieter or louder in in kind of response to us. Oh, I I think this relates primarily to to birds, but also to a variety of other animals.

SPEAKER_02: 49:34

Yeah, I've read about in birds and also I think um amphibians as well, they change the pitch, you know, depending on what other sounds are around them, so that they can be heard. Um, certainly, yeah, birds in cities, I think their the pitch is has gone higher than birds in the wild or in more quieter places, so that they can be heard above the sort of like the hum, you know, the traffic hum or just the general noise that we make as people.

SPEAKER_05: 50:03

Yeah, uh, and and animals really do make incredible noises. So this was one of the joys of spending time on the archives, was actually listening to just some of these noises because they are surprising. So we spoke about the Haddock earlier, and um, I mean, I came across uh sound of a wolf, which was just incredible. It really just cut through everything. There's there's something really special about a a wolf howl, which I guess is why it has so much significance in our imaginations, too. So I spent some time, I just kind of got a bit lust in the archives listening to these sounds and trying to imagine and and be with them for a bit, which is really brilliant. And this got me thinking a little bit about what what is your favorite sound? Do you do you have a favorite sound or a sound you'd like to share with us today?

SPEAKER_02: 51:24

There's so there's so many, and every time I do my job, every time I work, I will change my mind. I mean, there's so many, but I think one of my favorite ones, it just sounds like such an insane little bird, is a is a South American bird, or I think it's from Costa Rica, uh, called the Montezuma Oropendula. So it's this bird, and it's it's it does the male sits on a branch, so it's during the mating season or the breeding season, trying to um attract a mate, and he'll sit on the branch and he makes this crazy little sound as he flips himself upside down and sticks his tail in the air, and it's just this really weird, like bubbling, it's just it just sounds um I'll have to send it to you to play or something because it's just I just love it. Every time you feel a little bit, you know, down or something, just listen to this bird. And it sounds like he's having a really good time as well. It just it's like it's just going, it's such a strange bird. Um, I love that. Then there are other ones, you know, like the sounds of tadpoles eating dandelion leaves, and they just sound like they're just munching away in the water. Um, or gibbons singing, you know, it's all so many different ones. Or the underwater pond the pond sounds.

SPEAKER_05: 53:03

Yeah, I think uh Brian Pajanowski played some sounds of gibbons, and it was really uh like amazing the sounds they make. Um and I love the sounds of animals eating. Um, I think I've said before my one of my favorite sounds of the world is lioness eating kibble, just a yum yum yum. That's so good. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 53:20

Yeah, I love the sound of eating. They're there, just like mum mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, ma. They're just really enjoying their dandelion. And then we've got the bird who's just swinging on his branch, you know, just going, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 53:34

I mean, animal sounds, there is so much joy in listening to them. Um and that makes me think then, you know, like these are really fun sounds that kind of make us feel good, you know. There's there's something, I don't know, whimsical about some of these sounds. Oh, yeah. Do you do you find that there's a bias towards only including good sounds or happy sounds? Or do you also bad sounds or angry sounds including?

SPEAKER_02: 53:56

Happy sounds, you know, but the ones where they're not trying to not fight. Or do you have yeah, recordings of of animals uh like fighting, fighting with each other, or um you know, the alarm calls, and sometimes they they sound really, really unhappy, you know. So it's it's those kinds of sounds, but then there are also sounds that just don't sound very nice. So if you're you know you're used to like listening to I don't know, lovely skylark, you know, a nightingale, and it's also beautiful, and then you know, you know, you might listen to some some other kind of animal where it's not such a nice sound, you know, not such a pleasing sound. So there are those, but that's all very subjective as well. Those those kinds of sounds.

SPEAKER_05: 54:37

Yeah, it's it's fun to listen, and it is subjective, right? Um, I mean it's also based on our own cultures and stuff as humans, and you've got to wonder kind of what sounds animals themselves enjoy hearing. Um, but yeah, I just think it's interesting to think through also like the bad sounds, like what does it sound like when they're angry at each other, or how do we even discern those types of sounds? Um, because I I don't know, maybe this speaks a bit back to uh some of what came up with uh, you know, talking to Carl Safina, for example, about the idea of beauty. You know, he spoke about how green and blue are these fundamental uh kind of signs of beauty for a variety of animals, and yeah, maybe there's some sort of commonality as well in terms of ugliness um and our bias to not include ugly. But anyway, um, you know, those those sounds of animals munching, and and there is something just joyful, it just really is happy and it makes me feel happy. Um and and yeah, there's so much value, I think, in in listening to animals, like actually listening to and and wondering why we smile at those sounds and and what that all means. It is joyful, yes. I find it incredibly joyful. Um yeah, but perhaps now we can uh switch gears. We're we're nearing the end of the interview now, and uh it's time to to hear your quote. So uh could you uh tell us who your quote is by and um yeah, just tell us your quote.

SPEAKER_02: 55:59

It's not very profound, it's not very cerebral, but it sums up the life of a wildlife sound recordist. So it comes from a 1938 publication, a sound book called Animal Language, um, that was written by the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, and the sound recordings were made by the wildlife sound recordist Ludwig Koch, and they went around um two separate zoos in the UK. Excuse me. So they went to London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo to record um camels and uh tapirs and other and other animals, and they wanted to focus on why animals communicate and how they communicate. So they made the soundbook with two discs, and in the book, um Julian Huxley writes about this experience that Ludwig Koch had while trying to record the wolves at Whipsnade Zoo. So what Julia Huxley wrote, the wolf pack at Whipsnade can only be described as disobliging. As the headkeeper explained, the wolves usually start their concerted howling when they hear a particular siren, which goes at five each afternoon. But when the microphone was put in position, the siren failed to elicit any response. The wolves looked towards Mr. Koch, who was standing by it with a sort of sly defiance but remained entirely mute. And this is so difficult for a wildlife sound recorder. You know, you prepare, you go to your place, you set up, but the bird or whatever it has that's been vocalizing like crazy, and you turn on your microphone and they just look at you as if to say, nope, I'm not doing this anymore. And they either fall silent or they fly away while they laugh at you.

SPEAKER_05: 57:50

Yeah. Actually, at home, um, you know, every time I want to record Linus or or someone, um, and I swear this is some sort of phenomenon, you know, Linus will be doing something, playing, um, making a sound. And I I think I'm being very slick and sly, and I pull up my phone to record him, and the second my phone is out, he stops his behavior. Animals just know they know that they're being observed. And um, yeah, and there's there's something interesting going on there with the zoo as well, because it means that the wolves are not just there, they're actually watching who's watching them. Um, which is yeah, it's really, it's it's really uh fascinating to think about. Is uh I like the idea of defiance. I like that they were like, uh-uh, you got me here, but um I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give you what you want right now.

SPEAKER_02: 58:35

Yeah, they they just it's so it's every wildlife sound recordist would have experienced something like this where you're ready, you push the record button, and the subject that has been vocalizing, you know, we'll do it like clockwork. As soon as you try and record, no, it's not it's not gonna not gonna play. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_05: 58:54

I mean, yeah, something must be going on. They must know because it just happens too often. It just happens too often with too many animals. Um yeah, they're obviously watching us too.

SPEAKER_02: 59:04

Yeah, they must sense it. I mean, there's a sense, it's a sense that we've probably lost ourselves, but that they must they must know that you're trying to do something. And they just think, no, no, you can't. You know, it's not a free-for-all. You can't have what you want all the time. We're not gonna do it.

SPEAKER_05: 59:20

So well, good for them. Good for um, I mean, this is how animals assert themselves. And what what a lovely, I think what a lovely quote that also sums up some of what we've spoken about today, you know, some of the quandaries with recording sound, uh, some of the tensions between the idea of nature and manufactured, right? Like these are wolves in a zoo, um, but also the agency of animals, too, the agency that animals can choose to not respond, they can choose to not sound, um, that there is defiance. And yeah, this brings in all different dimensions of sound here, which I think is really fascinating, both the kind of labor that goes into making a sound by a recordist, but also that animals have agency and that they also have click. In the world, right? Like the where are you recording the sound matters as well as some of that metadata you were talking about earlier. Um, so yeah, really, really fascinating quote. Thank you so much for sharing that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:10

Yeah, yeah. I I like things like that where it it describes how how the animals are behaving. And it's a really it's a really good book. And I don't think he ever did record those of the wolves. I don't think he did. I think I'm thinking about what other animals were on that publication. And he recorded the camels and the tape here and some other animals. I don't think he ever did the wolves. Maybe they just stayed completely quiet and they weren't interested in the fame.

SPEAKER_05: 1:00:37

Well, good for them. Um, all right. Well, thank you so much again uh for all of your time. Uh, as we wrap up here, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about what you're working on now and uh if people want to get in touch with you, how they could do that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:49

Well, at the moment, I am well, I mean, I'm doing a variety of things. We've just wrapped up um a crowdsourcing project on Zooniverse. So that's a metadata project linked with some sound recordings that we had made in Ontario and Canada. So the guy that made the recordings of the grey wolf that you listened to on the website, some of his collections they come with a lot of metadata, but our cataloguers haven't had time to capture everything, so we went and put it onto Zooniverse just to see how that worked. And that's just wrapped up. That's a hundred, you know, 1100 recording sheets that have been transcribed by lovely volunteers for us. Um, so that's great. That metadata can now go into the catalogue to enhance the catalogue records to make them more valuable. So I'm thinking about doing another one of those. Also working on um an exhibition that's going to come at the library, an animals-themed exhibition that's you. Yeah, I know, it's exciting. Um with my that'd be um 2023. So it takes a long while, you know, but it's looking at how we have tried to understand the natural world over the past 2,000 years using science, art, and sound. So that's uh fascinating. That's taken up a lot of time. Um, but it's it's really good, and yeah, just working on collections and uh just yeah, just keeping things, just juggling, juggling, juggling all the time. Um, in terms of people wanting to if you want if you're really keen on becoming a wildlife sound recordist and you want to find out more about that, there's an association called the Wildlife Sound Recording Society, it's an international association, and they are a really good source of information. You know, if you want to learn about what kit to buy, uh techniques, um they if you want to be part of that community, you know, start start sorry, headphone just fell out. Um, yeah, to just join with like-minded people to find out more. The Wildlife Sound Recording Society is a good one. Um, our new website, British Library Sounds, will hopefully be launching next year, late spring, hopefully. And that will have tens of thousands of what it's gonna have content from all across the sound archive, but it will have 30,000, 40, 50,000, maybe wildlife and environmental sounds on there, most of which will be uh available under a Creative Commons license. So, you know, feel free to explore. I mean, it's a big body of work to explore, you know, and the quality won't always be incredible, you know, because we we will take recordings that aren't of top quality, so there'll be a lot of uh variety, but there'll be plenty there. Um, and other sounds, you know, like weather and water and habitat recordings and things like that. So I'm doing a lot of work getting these collections ready. Um and yeah, there's it, there's a that there should be a link to the collection guide for my area, which tells people a little bit more about um the history of my area and what we have, which I think that will go into the into your show notes. I think for sure. Um yeah, you f oh I would I don't know if I'd recommend following me on Twitter at the moment because I barely do anything, so it might be quite boring. So I'm not sure. But I'm trying to get better at doing that, and the Sound and Vision blog as well. There's some quite nice um yeah, the British I should send you the link for that. Yeah, British Library Sound and Vision blog. And again, I used to do a lot of blogging, and at the moment I'm not doing so much.

SPEAKER_05: 1:04:18

So again, oh man, there's just there's just too much to do. There's so much uh going on, and uh yeah, just just too much to do.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:28

But thank you for yeah, I was really in the zone at one point and I was churning them out, and I was just on fire, and it all seems to have just like fizzled out, and it's a shame because I really like I really like blogging and I really like sharing the sounds with people and explaining just just you know giving context to some of the recordings. And I haven't done it for a long time, and it's very bad of me. No, and I need to sort myself out and do it. Oh no, I think you're doing plenty.

SPEAKER_05: 1:04:51

Uh looking at the size of your archive, everything is uh incredible, and um, it's been a real joy talking to you today. So thank you for all of the work you do for kind of unpacking some of what sound archives are with us uh today, as well as how researchers who are interested in animal studies could use them in the future. Uh, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, and uh I hope that we speak again in the future. Um, so yeah, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:17

Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_05: 1:05:18

It's got flown by Hannah, it's so great to have you back on the show. Um, I know we've had a little bit of a break. I hope uh happy new year. I hope you had a lovely break. Yeah, thank you to you. And today's highlights is particularly special um because you know an awful lot about this animal.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:44

I just know a thing or two. I don't know about that.

SPEAKER_05: 1:05:47

Well, I think it's a bit more than a thing or two. So today we're gonna be talking a bit about the ivory bill woodpecker. Uh so yeah, why don't you take it away?

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:56

All right, well, yes, as you say, it's a special one because the ivory bill woodpecker is in large part the subject of my PhD thesis and especially um their sounds. Uh, so I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about them. Of course, only a brief glimpse, but hopefully people find it interesting nonetheless. So, to introduce you to Ivory Bill woodpeckers, if you don't have don't know about them, they are or perhaps were large striking woodpeckers that were the second largest um in North America, and they can be found in the southeastern swamps of the USA as well as in Cuba, and they're a type of campephalous woodpecker, and people call them the Lord Godbird or holy grail birds due to their kind of striking size and plumage, but also their incredible rarity. So, on that note, they haven't been conclusively seen, they say, since 1944, but they are that fact is hugely debated. Uh, some people think that they're still around quite strongly, and even say that they've seen or heard them with their own eyes or their own ears, and they're currently the subject of this huge, kind of raging legal debate because the US have claimed the US Fish and Wildlife Service say that they're extinct, other people say they're not, so there are these kind of public hearings and all this stuff going on at the moment. Um, so really fascinating species in that sense, but also just a fascinating species in their own right, regardless of all of that. And so I want to talk about their sounds today. So they have two kind of principal soundmaking strategies. So the first are uh calls, which hopefully we'll be able to hear a clip of, um, and those are uh kind of these nasal sounding notes, which I don't know, before I started studying this, I don't think I'd ever thought about what a woodpecker would sound like, apart from like pecking, but they make these quite kind of weird otherworldly sounds, and people say that they sound like a children's toy trumpet or the sound of someone blowing through a clarinet mouthpiece, which is quite specific. But if you have a clarinet mouthpiece at home, blow through it, and you can sound like an ivory bulb. Um so, yes, their vocalizations people call them Kent calls, um, because we kind of talked before about the ways that people describe bird sounds, and that was they're supposed to sound like Kent, the word Kent. But no, I'm trying to imagine I'm trying to imagine someone blowing through a clarinet saying Kent, like they try and make these things to make it sound like make you easier to imagine, but sometimes I think it actually makes it a little bit harder.

SPEAKER_05: 1:08:50

What is it, what is what is I mean, I guess I first have to understand what a clarinet sounds like. Okay, I'm definitely gonna put on the clarinet.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:56

A clarinet mouthpiece, it's very specific.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:01

Okay, so it's worth doing that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:03

No, but go ahead. Um, and so that's one of their kind of main sound making strategies. And then the other one is um, of course, as a woodpecker, uh, they use their beaks to uh or bills rather to hit against usually wood, um, but increasingly woodpeckers in general kind of use artificial structures too. But with Ivory Bull woodpeckers, they uh use uh the sounds they make are called double knocks, and these are loud, rapid knocks that are made by two strikes of the bird's bill against a wooden substrate. And usually that's a this is a display, an alarm, or um a contact signal. But these sounds of the ivory bell have never been conclusively recorded, but we know about them from like written accounts as well as other camphalous woodpecker species that uh still exist in South America. So I want to talk on a little bit of a tangent about the pecking and the blows of woodpeckers in general, because we've talked a lot about kind of the calls and the sounds that animals make, but not so much about their kind of mechanical sounds. Um, and of course, these are very integral to many animal sonic worlds as well. Given all the knocks and blows and drums of a woodpecker and that are integral to a woodpecker's way of life, you might find yourself wondering don't they get headaches with all of that? With all of that pecking with all the heads against wood. I, you know, I found myself wondering just that. So, you know, they have this reaction animal book series. There's one called The Woodpecker by Gerald Gorman, and he kind of talks about this and talks about all these anatomical adjustments that woodpeckers have, which means specifically that they don't get headaches. So, like where their bill is placed, how thick their skull is. There's a special kind of uh fluid that um is between a woodpecker's skull and its brain that absorbs the shock of it pecking and all kinds of other things. Uh, and it's kind of has this flexible but hard bill, and yeah, and so they don't get headaches. And there's been a lot of like biomimicry uh stuff to try and figure out um how that those kind of adjustments can be used to help people and especially like American football players not to get brain injuries. There was recently a paper um in Social Studies of Science by Gregory Holland just about that and about the ethics of that. So that's really interesting. But anyway, that's too much of a that's my tangent about woodpeckers and headaches. Um but quickly considering this week was about um sound archives, so that's why I wanted to talk about the ivory build with pecker. Because there is only one sound recording or one kind of series of sound recordings that exist of the Ivory Build with Pecker, and it was taken in 1935 in Louisiana by ornithologists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and this recording just has those kind of Kent weird caronette mouthpiece calls, um, as well as some drumming. And that you can now listen to these on the Cornell's Macaulay Library website, and it's just cool in its own sense because we don't really have a lot of sound recordings of um presumed extinct species because sound recording technology is so new, but kind of very sadly, the number of recordings that we have of extinct species is growing because of there's so many kind of recently extinct species. And so, yes, don't have a lot of time to go into it here, but um it's kind of my feeling that this sound recording has really quite radically changed the event of the ivory bulls extinction. And one of the reasons for this is that there are all of these people trying to kind of prove the existence, the persistence of the bird, and to try and locate it in the field. And one of the ways that they do that is through this process called playback, where they kind of go on the Macaulay Library website and find this 1935 recording and they play it in forests to try and elicit a response from surviving ivory bills. And it and many of them, many of these people claim to have gotten responses from ivory bills to this kind of historical recording, which is really kind of amazing when you think about this, this kind of intergenerational communication between like a 2022 Ivory Bird Woodpecker and a 1935 Ivory Bird Woodpecker. And and even if they kind of it isn't ivory bills, like there are cases in which they think that because of this playback technology, then other birds have or can like learn the calls. So like blue jays can then like mimic these ivory build woodpecker calls that have been played to them. So it's kind of like almost intro reintroducing this sound into the forest.

SPEAKER_05: 1:13:55

Gosh, that's interesting. Because yeah, I mean, that's that's not even something I spoke about with with Cheryl was kind of the idea of intergenerational communication with sound archives, right? Like we spoke very much about how I think humans are using these archives and how animal studies researchers could use them to better understand animals. Um, but that's obviously then to kind of have this idea that animals are one, like monolithic, and that one animal's call can necessarily help. I mean, they I do think they can help us to understand a variety of uh different species, but of course, over that kind of period, that kind of time frame, animals are gonna have changed, right? Um maybe there we we we speak about culture, we speak about these ideas, you know. Obviously, there's gonna be shifts in these calls, and and that's really interesting. Like, how would I communicate to someone? I mean, I guess I have communicated to people from but you have still intergenerational differences, right? There's cultural differences across across time, across age. So that's really that's I hadn't I hadn't thought of that. That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:03

Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_05: 1:15:03

So cool.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:04

Keep an eye out. Hopefully, I'll write a publication about it sometime.

SPEAKER_05: 1:15:07

Sometimes keep an eye out. Um I love the idea of a bird who doesn't get headaches and who can communicate across time. Uh, definitely makes the Avery Bullwood pick a cool uh cool animal to focus on for this highlight. Uh thank you again, Hannah, so much for the highlight. A huge thank you once again to uh Cheryl Tip for being an amazing guest. Uh even with all of the back and forth and the things that went wrong, I think things turned out really well. So thank you, Cheryl, for all of your time and for your patience with me. Thank you to Hannah Hunter for doing an incredible animal highlight once again to Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the bed music. If you haven't done so already, please make sure that you check out our YouTube channel. And I'm currently rolling out a thing called quick clips, which are short video um video clips from some of the interviews from season three. I'd love to hear your thoughts on these. Um, it's something that we're busy developing. So if you like it, let us know. If you think there's room for improvements or things you'd like to see, let us know too. My husband Oliver Hurtenfelder is actually helping me put these together. Um, slowly getting things together in bits and pieces. With looking ahead, I wanted to point everyone to the Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics website, Apple. Apple is currently has calls out for postdocs. If you're in the market for a postdoc and you're looking for a great place to call home for a little while, uh consider joining Apple and submitting an application. They're due in February. And you'll be working with Will Kimlika and Sue Donaldson. So definitely well worth it. I cannot tell you how supportive and wonderful they are as mentors. So have a look at that application, send in your application, and also maybe just hang out a bit at the Apple website and see what they've got on offer. And while I'm drawing attention to them, I also just want to say a huge thank you to the other sponsors on the show, which is SAP Lab and the Sonic Art Studio, both of which are labs at Queen's University that deal with sound in different ways. So yeah, really, really exciting uh stuff happening. And I hope you go and check it out and let me know what you think. Okay, that's it for me, everybody. This is The Animal Turn with me, Claudia Hirtenfelder.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:37

For more great iRule podcasts, visit irallpod.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.