Transcribing bird vocalizations (1 Viewer)

[fa52]

Is there a (pragmatic) way to transcribe bird vocalizations on paper?

I often hike without technology on me, bar a paper notebook.
I can transcribe bird vocalizations that are melodic on a music staff, but more complex ones are too difficult to transcribe.

 

[Lerxst]

I've tried to sketch the spectrograms, just as I had always tried to see them mentally as the song was unfolding. There is a certain level of detail one must be willing to forgo in many cases, such as harmonic-rich sounds, which I would usually indicate with a series of parallel horizontal lines. I found that I could make rough diagrams that yet had a clear correspondence to actual spectrograms in most cases, although honestly, if I looked at what I drew for say a catbird and blue jay, they'd look pretty similar along the vertical axis. The beauty is that spectrograms are the 'natural' representation, and this mimics notes on a staff as well.

Just as I write this, I can hear a House Wren out my window mocking me, saying, 'Oh yeah? Transcribe this!' and it just looks like a scribble. I think it is a wonderful project to set oneself, to devise a system to do this. Good luck and I'd like to know how it goes.

 

[jurek]

Here is an excrept from my attempt to write a bird guide many years ago:

"VOICE TRANSCRIPTIONS
Reading written description, despite its subjectivity, is still most common in the field. Don’t expect your impression
to exactly match letter translation.
Bird sounds can be described using such rules:

• Speed of the call is matched by hyphenation, so an accelerating call is kik, kik, kik kik-kikkikkikiki’ki’…
• Wovels match height and sharpness of the sound, so krek is sharp while kek is not. Bip is harder that kik. Rip is descending while tij is ascending.
• Louder parts are written in bold or uppercase. At times, allow some flexibility to best match the field impression.

However, accept that most bird calls cannot be well translated into sounds of human voice. This especially concerns harsh and nasal sounds, which can be rendered equally well, or equally imperfectly, by very different words. The same call of the Corncrake might be rendered as: crex-crex!, errp-errp or krrt-krrt. High whistles are also problematic, because highest vowel is ''i', so rendering e.g. the modulated whistling song of the Goldcrest one runs out of wovels.

So, translating a call to human sounds is not enough. Write the following:

• Was it long or short?
• Low or high?
• Sharp or mellow?
• Ascending or descending?
• How many syllables?
• Was tempo fast or slow?
• In a long, complex song concentrate on the general overview:
• How long is the song – few sounds or few long strophes?
• Are any features characteristic, e.g. louder trills or characteristic introduction?
• Does it include series of repeated sounds?
• Does it undulate up and down? (in Eurasia, Sylvia warblers and finches tend to have undulating songs, while reed warblers have songs with series of repeated sounds).
• How is the tone of the voice - high, low, fluting, sharp?
• How is the speed - slow or fast, thoughtful or hurrying?
• Are the sounds spaced or well joined together?
• How the general melody goes – you can draw lines going up and down as the song rises and falls."

 

[fa52]

Thank you both, quite interesting ideas — I admit I was not even aware of spectrograms until recently.