Describing the sounds of nature: Using onomatopoeia to classify bird calls for citizen science

Bird call libraries are difficult to collect yet vital for bio-acoustics studies. A potential solution is citizen science labelling of calls. However, acoustic annotation techniques are still relatively undeveloped and in parallel, citizen science initiatives struggle with maintaining participant engagement, while increasing efficiency and accuracy. This study explores the use of an under-utilised and theoretically engaging and intuitive means of sound categorisation: onomatopoeia. To learn if onomatopoeia was a reliable means of categorisation, an online experiment was conducted. Participants sourced from Amazon mTurk (N = 104) ranked how well twelve onomatopoeic words described acoustic recordings of ten native Australian bird calls. Of the ten bird calls, repeated measures ANOVA revealed that five of these had single descriptors ranked significantly higher than all others, while the remaining calls had multiple descriptors that were rated significantly higher than others. Agreement as assessed by Kendall’s W shows that overall, raters agreed regarding the suitability and unsuitability of the descriptors used across all bird calls. Further analysis of the spread of responses using frequency charts confirms this and indicates that agreement on which descriptors were unsuitable was pronounced throughout, and that stronger agreement of suitable singular descriptions was matched with greater rater confidence. This demonstrates that onomatopoeia may be reliably used to classify bird calls by non-expert listeners, adding to the suite of methods used in classification of biological sounds. Interface design implications for acoustic annotation are discussed.

JUDITH WEIR (b. 1954)The Voice of Desire (2003)

This chapter studies Judith Weir’s The Voice of Desire (2003). Weir’s music is fresh, concise, and instantly recognizable, and it successfully assimilates, within a modern idiom, the elements of traditional music and storytelling which are integral to her artistic persona. The piece sets four poems concerning the ambivalent relationships between birds and humans. As may be expected, bird calls and sounds of nature are illustrated strikingly, especially in the piano part. The selected texts provide plenty of variety in mood and character: the first and third songs are the most substantial, and the last a sublimely simple strophic ‘jingle’ which has to be delivered with understated aplomb. The vocal tessitura stays in a rewarding medium range for the most part, taking advantage of natural resonances that can penetrate the texture with ease and adapt to timbral shadings according to context. Helpful pitch-cues, including unisons, are to be found frequently in the piano part. Although originally written for mezzo, it can also be performed effectively by a counter-tenor.

Urban fox squirrels exhibit habituation to humans but respond to stimuli from natural predators

Animals in urban areas that experience frequent exposure to humans often behave differently than those in less urban areas, such as less vigilance or anti-predator behavior. These behavioral shifts may be an adaptive response to urbanization and caused by habituation to humans. A possible negative consequence is cross-habituation to natural predators where urban animals exhibit reduced anti-predator behavior in the presence of humans but also to their natural predators. We tested the hypothesis that habituation to humans in urban populations of fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) causes cross-habituation to stimuli from two possible predators (hawks and domestic dogs). We exposed squirrels in multiple urban and less urban sites to acoustic playbacks of a control stimulus (non-predatory bird calls), a natural predator (hawk), and dogs and recorded their vigilance and three different anti-predator behaviors when a human approached them while either broadcasting one of these three playbacks or no playbacks at all. In trials with no playbacks, urban squirrels exhibited reduced vigilance and anti-predator behavior compared to those in less urban areas but there was little evidence that urbanization altered the correlations among the different behaviors we quantified. Urban squirrels exhibited increased vigilance and anti-predator behavior when exposed to a human paired with hawk playbacks compared to the control playbacks. This indicates that urban squirrels did perceive and assess risk to the natural predator appropriately despite exhibiting habituation to humans. There is currently little evidence that habituation to humans causes animals to lose their fear of natural predators.

Radical Birdcalls: Avian Voices and the Politics of the Involuntary

This essay investigates Romantic-era treatments of bird calls as “unpremeditated”, spontaneous, and involuntary. Looking at parrots, starlings, mockingbirds, gamecocks, and skylarks in the work of writers including John Thelwall, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, and Helen Maria Williams, I explore the way in which talking and singing birds are often understood through reference to materialist philosophy and the associationism of David Hartley. Taking Thelwall’s King Chaunticlere and John Gilpin’s Ghost, and Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ and A Defence of Poetry as my main focus, I argue that these writers use materialist metaphors of unconscious avian utterance to make nuanced claims about the seemingly ambiguous role of the will in political speech.