Whale Song Artwork

I have recently been informed that visual representations of whale songs are now being considered artwork (thanks for the link Nick). I never knew that I was an artist, but in this digital world apparently it doesn't take much to call something art.

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(Bandwidth generously donated without consent from Miller's Rexall Inc.)

This image is a spectrogram of a humpback whale song. Unfortunately I wasn't lucky enough to make this recording, but I am lucky enough to work in a place where these sort of things are lying around on the shelf with various other sounds. I created the image for a lecture about dolphin and whale sounds, but now instead perhaps I'll start my own virtual art gallery. I'll let you decide whether its the gallery or the art that is virtual.

Its easy to read the spectrogram: Time is on the horizontal axis, while frequency is on the vertical axis. If you were to print this image as it is, it would be nearly 1cm of paper/second of recording. The colors represent the amount of energy in each frequency band for each unit of time. Its very similar to reading music -- the vertical axis is the staff, and the blobs of color are the notes. White blobs are louder than green blobs are louder than yellow blobs. The higher up on the vertical axis, the higher the pitch.

I'm still planning on posting pictures and an article about my trip to Doubtful Sound, but its taking longer than I planned. The whole place has an interesting story to tell, so I'll do my best to tell it as I saw it, but with a limited amount of free time it could take a while.

Music online

I have been using last.fm for a while now, and I think that it is a neat service. It is a social music service that collects your musical habits (but not personally identifiable information) and compares your tastes with other users. Thought you had ecclectic tastes? Well there's likely someone out there with similar wierd listening habits, and they might just have a new artist you never knew you liked. It works with most music players out there too.

I'm sure there are other services out there that do similar things, but last.fm has been at it for a while, and the website allows for tremendous wastes of time. Its also slightly less ugly and clunky than myspace. Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone was wondering about the track lists in the sidebar.

I'm back from the Doubtful Sound early due to broken gear, but I'll write more about that later. Enjoy.

Deep thoughts

Sorry for the misleading title for those of you who were expecting something along the lines Saturday Night Live's Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy, but I won't be posting any quotations tonight.

Actually, I apologize for the misleading first sentence as I've changed my mind.

Also, forgive me for the lack of content in this post, and forgive me for apologizing so much.

Down to business. I'm going on a field trip tomorrow and will be away from phones, computers and grocery stores for the next two weeks. I'm going to Doubtful Sound, and I'll be staying at the Deep Cove Hostel there. Doubtful sound is a lovely place, and I am looking forward to the taking pictures of the fiords and making audio recordings of the bottlenose dolphins who live there. Hopefully I'll have some pictures to post when I return on 18 August.

Here's a deep thought:

"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man."


-Bri