Acoustic Atlas

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Acoustic Atlas
AaLogoInverted-HighRes2.svg
Commercial?No
Type of project Audio archive
Location Montana State University Library, United States
Key peopleJeff Rice; Kenning Arlitsch; Doralyn Rossmann; Steve Hunts; Jim Espeland
EstablishedFebruary 1, 2013 (2013-02-01)
Website acousticatlas.org

Acoustic Atlas is a repository of sound recordings from the Western United States, including sounds made by animals, ambient recordings of environments, and interviews related to the topic of natural sounds. The collection is hosted by the Montana State University Library, and it is a collaboration between the library and Yellowstone National Park. The project focuses on the collection and dissemination of natural sounds of Montana and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, along with habitats and species from throughout the contiguous Western United States.

Contents

Purpose and scope

The Acoustic Atlas was founded in 2013 by Montana State University Library to create an audio archive to document regional ecosystems and biodiversity amid the impact of growing human populations in the Intermountain West region of the United States. [1] [2] The collection also includes Hawaii. [3] The archive includes more than 3000 online audio recordings of a range of animal sounds and environmental soundscapes. [4] Sounds in the collection are provided by recordists who are contractors, volunteers, researchers, and federal agencies such as the National Park Service. [2] All recordings are available to the public; many sounds are available for download and in the public domain. [5]

The mission of the Acoustic Atlas is to archive rare and under-represented recordings of species and environments and "to document natural soundscapes that are increasingly impeded by human activity and development." [4]

Types of recordings

The Acoustic Atlas includes relatively short recordings of sounds made by wildlife; longer ambient soundscapes that capture the collective sounds of natural environments; and interviews with scientists and other experts on subjects related to natural sounds. [6] These recordings are organized into categories based on taxonomic class, features of the environment (including water, weather, and geology), or dynamic chemical processes such as fire or photosynthesis. [7] Human-sourced sounds are included when they occur incidentally in environmental recordings [6] and are typically classified as anthropogenic noise. [8]

The collected and organized recordings of animal calls, such as deer and birds, can show differences in "dialects" between populations in different regions. [6] Some of the interviews discuss the practice of making recordings of wildlife, such as a recordist talking about holding ants in his teeth to get a recording of their sounds. [6] [9]

Some sounds are recorded in places of specific historic significance, such as the Trinity site at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. [10]

Sub-collections

The Ivan Doig collection includes the call of a western meadowlark. Sturnella neglecta1 (edit1).jpg
The Ivan Doig collection includes the call of a western meadowlark.

The archive's sub-collections include the sounds of terrestrial vertebrate species, species and soundscapes of Yellowstone National Park, and recordings from the grassland ecosystems of Montana. Since 2017, the archive has been developing a collection of ambisonic recordings made at locations within Montana and other Western states. [12]

The Soundscapes of Ivan Doig includes soundscape recordings and interviews from the lands and peoples featured in some of the American author's 16 novels. [11] This sub-collection includes the Wind from Eden Podcast and The History of Weather in Doig Country.

Yellowstone National Park

The Yellowstone Sound Library has samples of the sounds of geothermal areas boiling. Churning Caldron.jpg
The Yellowstone Sound Library has samples of the sounds of geothermal areas boiling.

In 2013, the Acoustic Atlas began collaborating with Yellowstone National Park to record and archive sounds from the park. This collaboration supports the creation of new field recordings, along with a podcast series that was jointly produced by Yellowstone National Park and the Acoustic Atlas from 2017 to 2019. [13] Audio producer Jennifer Jerrett recorded many of the sounds in this collection, both natural and human. [14] The project was partly funded by the Yellowstone Association and Yellowstone Park Foundation. [15]

Uses

In 2018, the mapping software company Esri worked with the Acoustic Atlas to develop the ArcGIS StoryMap "Sounds of the Wild West: An audio tour of Montana's four major ecosystems." [16] The Esri team incorporated both GIS data and sound in this platform. [17]

Sounds from the archive have been used in the film Walking Out (2017), [18] an exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah in 2019–2020, [19] radio programs on WBUR [20] [21] and Montana Public Radio, [22] and a New York Times Magazine multimedia exhibit about sounds around the world. [23]

Many of the sounds are also available for independent producers and song composers to use. [24]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yellowstone National Park</span> Natural park in the western United States

Yellowstone National Park is an American national park located in the western United States, largely in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho. It was established by the 42nd U.S. Congress with the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone was the first national park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world. The park is known for its wildlife and its many geothermal features, especially the Old Faithful geyser, one of its most popular. While it represents many types of biomes, the subalpine forest is the most abundant. It is part of the South Central Rockies forests ecoregion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yellowstone County, Montana</span> County in Montana, United States

Yellowstone County is the most populous county in the U.S. state of Montana. As of the 2020 census, the population was 164,731. Its county seat is Billings. Yellowstone County is named for the Yellowstone River which roughly bisects the county, flowing southwest to northeast. The river in turn was named after the yellow Sandstone cliffs in what is now Yellowstone County.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ambisonics</span> Full-sphere surround sound format

Ambisonics is a full-sphere surround sound format: in addition to the horizontal plane, it covers sound sources above and below the listener.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Surround sound</span> System with loudspeakers that surround the listener

Surround sound is a technique for enriching the fidelity and depth of sound reproduction by using multiple audio channels from speakers that surround the listener. Its first application was in movie theaters. Prior to surround sound, theater sound systems commonly had three screen channels of sound that played from three loudspeakers located in front of the audience. Surround sound adds one or more channels from loudspeakers to the side or behind the listener that are able to create the sensation of sound coming from any horizontal direction around the listener.

A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology to computer science. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources, natural and artificial, within a given area as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.

3D audio effects are a group of sound effects that manipulate the sound produced by stereo speakers, surround-sound speakers, speaker-arrays, or headphones. This frequently involves the virtual placement of sound sources anywhere in three-dimensional space, including behind, above or below the listener.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Doig</span> American writer

Ivan Doig was an American author and novelist, widely known for his sixteen fiction and non-fiction books set mostly in his native Montana, celebrating the landscape and people of the post-war American West.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Field recording</span> Audio recording produced outside a recording studio

Field recording is the term used for an audio recording produced outside a recording studio, and the term applies to recordings of both natural and human-produced sounds. It also applies to sound recordings like electromagnetic fields or vibrations using different microphones like a passive magnetic antenna for electromagnetic recordings or contact microphones. For underwater field recordings, a field recordist uses hydrophones to capture the sounds and/or movements of whales, or other aquatic organisms. These recordings are very useful for sound designers.

Acoustic ecology, sometimes called ecoacoustics or soundscape studies, is a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between human beings and their environment. Acoustic ecology studies started in the late 1960s with R. Murray Schafer a musician, composer and former professor of communication studies at Simon Fraser University and had the help of his team at Simon Fraser University as part of the World Soundscape Project. The original WSP team included Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, Bruce Davies and Peter Huse, among others. The first study produced by the WSP was titled The Vancouver Soundscape. The interest in this area grew enormously after this pioneer and innovative study and the area of acoustic ecology raised the interest of researchers and artists all over the world. In 1993, the members of the by now large and active international acoustic ecology community formed the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernie Krause</span> American musician, author, soundscape recordist and bio-acoustician (*1938)

Bernard L. Krause is an American musician and soundscape ecologist. In 1968, he founded Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes. Krause is an author, a bio-acoustician, a speaker, and natural sound artist who coined the terms geophony, biophony, and anthropophony.

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition is a conservation organization protecting the lands, waters and wildlife of the 20-million-acre (81,000 km2) Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

The World Soundscape Project (WSP) was an international research project founded by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s at Simon Fraser University. The project initiated the modern study of acoustic ecology. Its ultimate goal is "to find solutions for an ecologically balanced soundscape where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment is in harmony." The practical manifestations of this goal include education about the soundscape and noise pollution, in addition to the recording and cataloguing of international soundscapes with a focus on preservation of soundmarks and dying sounds and sound environments. Publications which emerged from the project include The Book of Noise (1968) and The Tuning of the World (1977), both by Schafer, as well as the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (1978) by Barry Truax. The project has thus far resulted in two major tours, in Canada and Europe, the results of which comprise the World Soundscape Library. Notable members included John Oswald, Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Soundscape ecology</span>

Soundscape ecology is the study of the acoustic relationships between living organisms, human and other, and their environment, whether the organisms are marine or terrestrial. First appearing in the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology edited by Barry Truax, in 1978, the term has occasionally been used, sometimes interchangeably, with the term acoustic ecology. Soundscape ecologists also study the relationships between the three basic sources of sound that comprise the soundscape: those generated by organisms are referred to as the biophony; those from non-biological natural categories are classified as the geophony, and those produced by humans, the anthropophony.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Montana State University Library</span>

The Montana State University Library (MSU Library) is the academic library of Montana State University, Montana's land-grant university, in Bozeman, Montana, United States. It is the flagship library for all of the Montana State University System's campuses. In 1978, the library was named the Roland R. Renne Library to honor the sixth president of the university. The library supports the research and information needs of Montana's students, faculty, and the Montana Extension Service.

Sound maps are digital geographical maps that put emphasis on the sonic representation of a specific location. Sound maps are created by associating landmarks and soundscapes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stuart Hyatt</span> Musical artist

Stuart Hyatt is an American musician and multimedia artist.

The Trout and Salmonid Collection is a special collection of literature and archives in the Montana State University Library's Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections Library. The collection is also known as The Bud Lilly Trout and Salmonid Bibliography, named after founder Bud Lilly. The approximately 11,000-volume collection, established in 1999, is devoted to preserving literary, scientific, government and media resources related to all aspects of trout and other salmonids. The collection contains materials in many languages and is not restricted by geography. It is considered a world-class collection of international significance relative to the study of trout and salmonids.

David Monacchi is an Italian sound artist, researcher and eco-acoustic composer, best known for his multidisciplinary project Fragments of Extinction, patented periphonic device, the Eco-Acoustic Theatre, and award-winning music and sound-art installations.

The conservation of bison in North America is an ongoing, diverse effort to bring American bison back from the brink of extinction. Plains bison, a subspecies, are a keystone species in the North American Great Plains. Bison are a species of conservation concern in part because they suffered a severe population bottleneck at the end of the 19th century. The near decimation of the species during the 1800s unraveled fundamental ties between bison, grassland ecosystems, and indigenous peoples’ cultures and livelihoods.# English speakers used the word buffalo for this animal when they arrived. Bison was used as the scientific term to distinguish them from the true buffalo. Buffalo is commonly used as it continues to hold cultural significance, particularly for Indigenous people. Recovery began in the late 1800s with a handful of individuals independently saving the last surviving bison.# Dedicated restoration efforts in the 1900s bolstered bison numbers though they still exist in mostly small and isolated populations. Expansion of the understanding of bison ecology and management is ongoing. The contemporary widespread, collaborative effort includes attention to heritage genetics and minimal cattle introgression.#

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Montana State University Archives and Special Collections</span>

The Montana State University Archives and Special Collections, also known as the Merrill G. Burlingame Archives and Special Collections, is located in Bozeman, Montana. The archives is on the second floor of the Renne Library on the Montana State University-Bozeman campus and consists of materials relating to the history of the American West, trout and salmonids, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and other topics.

References

  1. McGonigal, Chris; Offenberg, Nick (March 1, 2017). "The Sounds Of Yellowstone National Park Remind Us Why It's Worth Preserving". HuffPost. Retrieved May 3, 2022.
  2. 1 2 Brulliard, Nicolas (Summer 2016). "Surround Sound: The Acoustic Atlas' trove of recordings include grizzly cubs purring, ice freezing, and thousands of other elusive sounds". National Parks Conservation Association. Retrieved May 3, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  3. "New Podcasts Reveal Hidden Stories of Hawai'i". Big Island Now. September 18, 2019. Retrieved May 5, 2022.
  4. 1 2 "About Acoustic Atlas". Acoustic Atlas: Montana State University Library. Retrieved July 7, 2022.
  5. "Yellowstone National Park share a huge catalogue of free ambient sounds". Happy. September 8, 2021. Retrieved February 6, 2022.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 French, Brett (December 5, 2013). "A sound signature: MSU compiling regional Acoustic Atlas". The State Journal-Register. Associated Press. Retrieved July 27, 2022.
  7. Rice, Jeff (April 1, 2016). "Sound production in two species of eelgrass". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 139 (4): 2227. Bibcode:2016ASAJ..139R2227R. doi:10.1121/1.4950692 via asa.scitation.org (Atypon).
  8. "Sounds Of Yellowstone National Park To Be Captured For Posterity". National Parks Traveler. June 27, 2015. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  9. Rice, Jeff. "Interview with Dr. Hayward Spangler on ant sounds". Acoustic Atlas. Montana State University Library. Retrieved August 2, 2022.
  10. Rice, Jeff (July 16, 2018). "The toads of Trinity: witnesses to the atomic age". Here and Now. WBUR. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
  11. 1 2 "Ivan Doig Archive – Soundscapes of Ivan Doig". Montana State University Library. Retrieved July 9, 2022.
  12. "Ambisonic Collection". Acoustic Atlas: Montana State University Library. Retrieved August 21, 2022.
  13. "'Listen' to sounds of Yellowstone". Cody Enterprise. January 28, 2016. Retrieved July 9, 2022.
  14. Yamanaka, Jackie (January 28, 2016). "The Sounds of Yellowstone are now available online". Yellowstone Public Radio. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
  15. Reichard, Sean (January 28, 2016). "Yellowstone, MSU's Acoustic Atlas Debut GYE Audio Collection". Yellowstone Insider. Retrieved February 20, 2022.
  16. "Sounds of the Wild West: An audio tour of Montana's four major ecosystems". ESRI. 2018. Retrieved July 9, 2022.
  17. Cantrell, Anne (January 8, 2019). "Montana ecosystems come to life through sounds in new project". Montana Standard. Retrieved July 9, 2022.
  18. "Sounds for new film at Sundance". Montana State University Library. Retrieved May 5, 2022.
  19. "Many Acoustic Atlas recordings can be heard in an incredible new exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah". Twitter. October 20, 2019. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  20. Hobson, Jeremy (December 28, 2016). "'These sounds could go away': preserving the natural ambiance of Yellowstone". WBUR Here & Now. Retrieved February 21, 2022.
  21. Hobson, Jeremy (August 22, 2016). "How one audio archivist works to preserve Yellowstone's iconic sounds". Here and Now. WBUR. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
  22. Jerrett, Jennifer (February 12, 2016). "To catch a Loon". Montana Public Radio. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
  23. "Listen to the World". New York Times Magazine. September 21, 2018. Retrieved July 9, 2022.
  24. Shackleford, Tom (January 7, 2019). "Yellowstone audio samples keep national parks' spirit alive during government shutdown". Live for Live Music. Retrieved February 21, 2022.