Museums of sound: audio bird guides and the pleasures of knowledge

Abstract

Since the first commercial field guides appeared in the United States in the 1940s, audio guides have taught generations of listeners how to hear and recognise birds. In the pages that follow, I look at two different traditions of listening taught by these American guides. The first teaches rapid and efficient species identification; the second teaches more focused musical techniques that frame birds as autonomous, music-making beings. Drawing on the frameworks of animal studies, I situate the aural representations of birds in this essay as sites at which inequality is both performed and defined. In examining the pedagogies of audio field guides, I am also inviting questions about how traditions of listening shape our habits of perceiving others: how we hear birds, how we hear nonhuman animals, and how we hear those who are different more broadly.

Keywords:

• Birdsong
• bird song
• identification
• person
• personhood
• audio guide

Notes

1. It is with tremendous gratitude that I note the support this project has received from Karin Bijsterveld’s Sonic Skills group at the University of Maastricht. My thanks go to all of the participants in our 2014 gathering, particularly Karin Bijsterveld and Joeri Bruyninckx, Anna Harris, Stefan Krebs, Alexandra Supper, and Melissa Van Drie. I am also grateful to Wesleyan University Press for allowing me to use materials in this essay from my forthcoming book, Animal Musicalities (2017).

2. Helen Macdonald provides a fascinating study of the emergence in Britain during the same period of a more systematic, scientific birdwatcher, whom she contrasts to “organic” watchers (Macdonald 2002, 69).

3. Allaboutbirds ranks first in searches on google.com, yahoo.com, and bing.com (accessed 5 August 2014). The website is also the first result on these websites if a birder types in a North American bird’s name, followed by “song” or “call”, making it the point of entry to inquiries about bird species’ sounds online.

4. It is interesting to note that Cornell’s allaboutbirds.org generally gives birds shorter songs than Audubon’s https://www.audubon.org/field-guide; for example, the Yellow-billed Cuckoo is given 19 s on Cornell’s site, and 57 s on Audubon’s (with three examples); the Northern Cardinal is given 25 s and 1 min 57s, respectively (accessed 1 August 2014).

5. For more on this, see my article on the sound spectrograph (Mundy 2009).

6. Examples included The Frog Pond (Kilham 1969) Memories of the Old Mission San Capistrano and The Swallows Return to Capistrano (Anon. 1973b) and Voices of the Loon (Barklow 1980).

7. I was not able to access copies of Common Birds – Group 1 (1970a) and Familiar Birds – Their Young and Nests (1970b). According to Boswall and Couzens, these records each covered eight species (Boswall and Couzens 1982, 935). They were produced as part of the “Talking Picture-Story Study Print” series by the Society for Visual Education in Chicago, which created slideshows with accompanying phonograph records for schoolchildren. The audio in such recordings included narration with beeped cues to forward to the next slide, suggesting that these records probably contained considerable narration, probably about the habitat or life-histories of the birds they described.

8. Times are from the mp3 version of the album.

9. The guides of his youth included Simeon Pease Cheney’s Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music (Cheney 1891) and Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews’ Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music (Mathews 1904). Born in 1885, Allen would have been six and 19 when these books were first published.

10. A recent example is the National Audubon Society’s nationwide release in September 2014 of a study on climate change that used publicly-reported bird counts to calculate shifting migration patterns affected by climate, claiming that nearly half of North American bird species are currently threatened by climate change. (http://climate.audubon.org, accessed 15 September 2014).