Looking for Sound

In this past Friday’s issue of This Week in Sound, I shared a link to an example of a field recording practice in which spectrograms aid in the isolation of instances of activity within massive amounts of audio. Mat Eric Hart, whose work I had linked to, subsequently gave me permission to share examples of that technique. 

This is the appearance of a fox:

This marks the arrival of a little grebe:

And this is an owl:

I love the concept of looking for sound in advance of hearing it, since the approach reverses how the brain can work — we experience sound more quickly than we might see something. I also love how these images resemble objects surfacing in a night vision camera. Visit Mat’s post to hear audio from the session that yielded these results.