At six o’clock in the morning, it was just dark and many people were still asleep, but if you are in a tropical rain forest, you should be woken up at this time. The monkey’s scream came in the ears, and some animal quietly passed through the bushes; many insects and frogs were singing rhythmically, and the songs of birds interspersed in it, as clear and tactfully as the sound of a flute.
Although you have not stayed in the rain forest, you still have the opportunity to hear these “whispers” in the rain forest.
Install a tape recorder in the rain forest
Several scientists formed a team to go deep into the rainforest exploration… Such a story sounds cool, but in reality it is very torturous. The rain forest is not only humid and hot, but also hides various dangerous animals and plants. It is already very difficult for humans who are accustomed to cities to survive here, not to mention working for several weeks or even months!
Give up the adventure, how about setting up a few cameras in the rainforest? Many photos can be obtained, but the animals outside the lens are ignored, and the scope is too narrow; many animals are so small that they are difficult to detect even when they enter the lens.
Biologists have already thought of new methods. With the help of the locals, they traversed the rainforest, installed tape recorders on some trees, and recorded the rainforest’s 24 hour sound.
Take a picture of the sound
Not only do animals have their own characteristics, they also make different sounds. Some are low and slow, and some are high and rapid. From the low frog croak to the bat’s ultrasound, they can’t escape the sensitive microphone. When these sounds are recorded, the sound of wind, rain, etc. are added to form a “soundscape”.
To ordinary people, the soundscape may be the chirping noise of animals, but for biologists, the soundscape is a precious picture of nature. Through software analysis, the soundscape can be turned into a “spectrogram”-this is equivalent to a panoramic photo of the sound, which contains more information than a real photo.
The more noisy, the healthier
According to the spectrogram, people can understand the approximate distribution of animals, whether they appear during the day or at night, and so on.
Roughly speaking, the more complex the soundscape, the richer the creatures in this area; when the soundscape falls into silence, or is mixed with a large amount of man-made noises such as motor sounds and explosions, it indicates that the natural environment here has been destroyed and the animals To be driven away.
Protect nature with “shunfeng ears”
Compared with expensive cameras, recorders are not only good quality and low price, but also have a wider monitoring range. A dozen recorders can cover a large area and help people always pay attention to the safety of the natural environment. We can even look for gunshots in the soundscape and uncover sneaky poachers.
Not only tropical rain forests, people can also record the ocean, desert, temperate forest and other environments, but this requires more diverse collection equipment such as hydrophones and laser vibrometers.
At present, the computer program used to analyze the soundscape cannot recognize too many animals, but with the advancement of science and technology, in the future, the tape recorder is expected to become a “wind ear”, so that we can better protect nature.
