The Michigan recording project

The Michigan recording project.

I don't know much about this, but I suspect it will be a subject of conversation over the next few weeks.

I have looked at some of the vocalizations and they do appear to have a quality about which I've become interested -- looking at the spectrograms you can't really figure where the fundamental would be. I've written about this in the past. I'll put up a link when I've found it again..

So have a look at the website and see what's up for yourselves.

UPDATE: I talked about the weirdness I was seeing in Stan Courtney's Illinois Howl and then compared my own recording in Ohio to the Sierra Sounds recordings. Those two posts make the point I'm trying to make with pictures and everything.

I have some pictures from the Michigan sounds, let me get one up here.

First vocalization Aug 30-31 2008

And here are the notes I made as I worked with the call:

First call on tape:

Floor at 82Hz -- I think this is noise from the environment/present throughout clip

bump out at 515Hz
power plateau at 687 777Hz
peak at 1121Hz
peak at 1554Hz
gradual rise to peak at 2400Hz

Looks a bit weird to me. I think if I tried to make that sound, a) I couldn't do it, and b) the peaks would arrange themselves into harmonics, which isn't happening here. This appears to conform to my idea about bigfoot calls. Since I don't think that call could be made by anything known other than a man, if it isn't a bigfoot, I guess the only thing I'd want now is to know if some people can train their voices to do this at that volume, because I really cannot do it. Raven (an audio program) says that sound got pretty loud, too, though the amplifier in the recorder might account for that.

I don't know what made the calls in that file, but I do know that it interests me.