Thoughts: Cornell Bioacoustics Club

Today I attended my first meeting of the Cornell Bioacoustics Club. I had seen the CBC at the clubfest and was very interested in joining, considering my previous research experience in ML audio processing and my general interest in nature.

It was really fun! We hooked up some Zoom Z3 field recorders to fluffy mics and went around recording insects, bird calls, and chipmunks/squirrels. We were able to really pump up the gain on the Zooms and get very crisp sounds of things I would barely have been able to hear before.

The microphones really amplified the sounds of nature that I otherwise would have never paid attention to. I usually just treat the constant bird calls and chirping as background noise and filter it out. This made me a lot more mindful about just how much stuff goes on in our ecosystems that we never pay attention to. Of course, everyone knows our Earth is teeming with life and activity, but perhaps we don’t appreciate or consider it enough.

A problem we kept encountering was… noise pollution! (no surprise there.) There was a constant hum of cars as we recorded. Noise pollution is another type of noise that we always filter out, but it really is incredibly disturbing (for me trying to record animals and for the animals too, I’d bet.)

At the end, we visualized our recordings as spectrograms and saw some pretty cool patterns in bird calls.

I met some really cool people at the club as well! I am definitely not a birder or animal scientist, so this was a little unfamiliar to me at first. However, everyone was really welcoming and I will most likely be returning to the next meeting.