Perspectance

Golden and red-orange Fall has fallen against a clear blue sky today, the day my first child was born 27 years ago. I wish I could crunch through leaves with him, but he is working. Soon my soul, free to go out and wander for hours watching and listening to birds, will also be surrendered to a job I have wanted, so this day is even more precious.

This post was supposed to be notes from an hour of playing with Wavepad (that turned into two) a recent discovery for free download in my Windows Programs menu. It’s a pretty amazing and intuitive sound editor, like Audacity I guess – need to compare the two. I have been recording bird sounds on my Ipod to the point where I have a way too much data. Reminds me exactly of the excitement of capturing qualitative people data then sitting down at the computer to transcribe it. Tedious excited anticipation of the coding has to wait while I learn about sound editing (something I have always been curious about though). I learned from one of the readings in bird class that bird songs occupy an “aural niche”, a frequency especially situated to the ambient noise. This might prove helpful to know in trying to identify a bird by it’s sound. I tried comparing this one sound bite to an American Goldfinch identified on a website because Wavepad has a frequency analyzer. Even though the three-note song I my captured sounds similar, the frequencies are very different. It is hard to distinguish sounds when they are recorded at different levels and play so fast. I have to slow them way down, listen and look at the patterns to tell the difference. I feel so “out of tune” with the natural world seeing myself perseverate with a computer to “learn” what bird is what by analyzing the abstracted sign of the real. Blogging about it all is even a further abstraction. Whatever happened to my Spell of the Sensuous?

I must go seize this day outdoors now!