He has worked extensively in rainforests and dense vegetation, where many birds must be identified most of the time by sound. ![]() Reference recordings would have made Hunt’s system less confusing, said Glenn Seeholzer, a neotropical ornithologist with the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. ![]() “We sadly need a classification of sound qualities that will make what we can learn of this factor more definite and uniform for quality remains the one factor of bird song that is most difficult to describe and is least tangible,” he wrote. But Saunders’s own system wasn’t fully developed either. Saunders insisted that Hunt’s linguistic approach couldn’t capture pitch or timing the way a musical or hand-drawn graphical representation might. Sparrowy.Ī year after Hunt’s phonetics, in a reply to The Condor, ornithologist Aretas A. Ventriloquial, tantara, feminine, crepitate. Zizzy, uncanny, pebble-tapping, lusty, pule. Some words are relatively straight-forward onomatopoeia, some are nicely evocative, and some are frankly incomprehensible.Ĭrick, creak, crack, croak. He also included a list of about 500 descriptors related to qualities of “pitch, intensity, rate of speed, form, expression, timbre.” The list is alphabetized, rather than grouped by characteristic, and there is no further explanation. Hunt didn’t provide many examples of transcribed sound, but recommended that the call of the Western Wood-Pewee, which the Audubon Society describes as a “harsh nasal pee-eeer,” should be transcribed as follows: These symbols describe pitch and duration initial sounds timbre or sound quality and complicated noises such as trills. For his part, Hunt divided his alphabet into four types of characters borrowing or adapting terminology from human linguistics: vowels, explosives, fricatives, and musicals. The International Phonetic Association, an organization that oversees the IPA, was founded in 1886. GettyThe 1923 paper shows the influence of the then relatively new science of linguistics and may be modeled in part on the widely-used International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a standardized method of transcribing the spoken languages of the world. Modern ornithologists do not use a standardized alphabet for bird-ese.Ī male Yellowhammer, Emberiza citrinella. Bird sound words are specific to language or even dialect they fail to capture fine variation in a single call and perhaps most importantly, they are terribly subjective.īird watchers have plenty of wonderful terms for bird sounds, but for scientists there are a few clear shortcomings: Bird sound words are specific to language or even dialect they fail to capture fine variation in a single call and perhaps most importantly, they are terribly subjective.īird sound experts agreed that although Hunt enthusiastically identifies an enduring scientific challenge-how to communicate about sounds-his proposal has few redeeming qualities.
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