those birds of the samson box

[Juan Reyes]

Hi Bill,

My apologies for a not so technical question and rather historic.

What is the history behind birds.clm (birds.scm) ?.

Once again, there seems to be a growing interest in bio-acoustics on
some of my students.

Thanks a lot,

  --* Juan

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[Bill Schottstaedt]

> What is the history behind birds.clm (birds.scm) ?.

Around 1980 I wanted a bird song for "Colony", but realistic-sounding
bird songs are not easy to make from scratch.  So I got out my bird book,
Robbins, Bruun, Zim, Singer "Birds of North America" Golden Press, NY 1966,
which had sonograms of most of the songs.  The graphs were incredibly
small, so I needed a magnifying glass to read them, but in many cases,
you could simply copy the data into the frequency and amplitude envelopes
of a sine wave instrument, and a pretty good bird song would
result.  My main collaborator in this research was the AI lab cat
named Marathon.  She would prowl around the speakers trying to find the
birds, which I took as expert approval.  bird.clm/scm is a very direct
translation of those notelists.

Here's the Samson box version of the bird:

Instrument(Bird);
INTEGER ARRAY Gens[1:3];
REAL ARRAY Frats,ARats[1:3];
INTEGER i,AllOut,FltOut;
Pars(<(Name,Beg,Dur,Frq,FrqSkw,Amp,Deg,Rev,FUNCTION FrqF,FUNCTION AmpF,LpCoeff)>);
Waiter(Beg);
Gens[1]Osc(Pns,AllOut,Zero,Sinemode);
IF LpCoeff>0 AND LpCoeff<1
  THEN FltSig(Pns,FltOut,AllOut,LpCoeff,1-LpCoeff,0,1)
ELSE FltOutAllOut;
LocSig(Pns,FltOut,Deg,1,Rev);
AddEnv(Pns,Gens[1],"F",Frq,FrqSkw,FrqF);
AddEnv(Pns,Gens[1],"A",0,Amp,AmpF);
End_Instrument(Pns);

The funny characters are left-arrows in the SAIL character set.
The low-pass filter was for distance effects.

Many years later, I made what I think are better renditions in
animals.scm, using Snd to make the sonograms, and some very good
recordings from Cornell.  There's documentation about that in
sndscm.html.  Some bird songs are incredibly beautiful when
slowed down via granular synthesis.



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[Juan Reyes]

Hi Bill,

Thanks a lot for your response, for the hints, anecdotes and story but
most of all thanks for the Samson box code. It gives me lots of insight.

I see that little can be automated since whether we want it or not, to
get realistic sounds we need whole song sonograms. Wow, it must have
been lots of work at the time..

But your hint of getting the sonograms of a birdsongs onto Snd to get
the envelopes seems reasonable and a great way for people to get used to
envelopes and additive synthesis. Sorry I overlooked the issue in
animals.scm.

BTW, on trying to follow this procedure with duck quacks and
interestingly enough I jumped into this web page [1], stating that a
duck's quack doesn't echo. Although it seems that's only a myth.

 --* Juan

[1] http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/acoustics_info/duck/


>
> Many years later, I made what I think are better renditions in
> animals.scm, using Snd to make the sonograms, and some very good
> recordings from Cornell.  There's documentation about that in
> sndscm.html.  Some bird songs are incredibly beautiful when
> slowed down via granular synthesis.

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