Hello,The first sound I looked at when I started this exploration was the sound of a Blue whale, recorded off the California coast. Now, it was interesting, of course-- but in ways that eventually crashed the machine. It just took a lot of memory to process, because of the nature of the sound.
How can I say this without being a geek? :)
Well, simply put, the higher I went in scale with this sound, the clearer the picture got. After analyzing thousands of sounds, I can state categorically that this is a very unusual thing to do. Typically as you went up in scale the image of a sound eventually faded to noise-- but the image of the sound of a Blue whale just became more clear! It was puzzling.
So, after exploring the properties of the sounds of dozens of other species, and now with a bag of tricks learned in the process, I finally set my sights on overcoming the technical issues presented by the Blue whale. The image above is the result of a new processing algorithm. What you see here is my first ever image of both the "A" and the "B" calls in an A/B call sequence, covering about 83 seconds of time from left to right.
One of the interesting things you can see (especially at the bottom) is that the "A" call is barely over before "B" is commencing. It appears to be similar to the process used by a trumpet player who has learned to breathe in while continuing to play. Neither the sonogram or the waveform amplitude will give you the slightest hint of this aspect of the sound.
Even more extraordinary, at least to me, is that time at the bottom of the image is about the same as a decent ocean swell, with a period of 14 seconds. The literature on the subject of cetacean acoustics will tell you Blues sing at very low frequencies, generally around 20 Hertz. Nothing in the literature I have seen will tell you it can be shown that components of their songs go lower, far lower, even than that.
To hear the song this image came from (sped up slightly to be audible), check out a slide show made from it.
Enjoy,
Mark
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