Friday, August 28, 2009

Experiment on Animal Sounds

made for completing one task I got from a class called Mapping.

The idea of this experiment is to classify the animal sounds into pitches. Just like human, animal also talks in various tones (different frequencies of voice).
We can grumble and produce low pitch sounds or we can clamor and produce high pitch sounds. Animal never talks in one tone only, which is why the sound that an animal produce is already “music” to me. Therefore I cannot classify each animal voice into an exact category of pitches.

But still, just like human, I think animal voice can be put into groups of vocal range too. Some animal talks in its natural low vocal range and some other has a higher vocal range. To compare it with the human voice, let’s say for instance, a lion growls in its bass voice and a rooster crows in its countertenor voice. That is how I classify the voices, based on their vocal range.

I could not find anyone made a research on animal’s vocal range or scientifically put it in voice category, therefore there is no scientific explanation for the classification I made in this experiment. It is just my idea of mapping the animal sounds and form some music from it.

The Notes
Since I'm not a musician nor have the sensitivity to distinguish notes, I will not draw a formula to show which sound is similar to which note. So there is no do-re-mi in this list of notes, just the names of the animals. I try to put them in order from the lower vocal range to the higher, but it will only be based on my own interpretation.
So these are the animal sounds I use in this experiment.



The Music
I didn't take all the "notes" to form the music, just some of them. Honestly, the result is not as good as I've imagined before and it is very short. I tried to make it longer, but I was stuck. I guess I'm just not creative enough to be a composer :)



PS:
The inspiration comes from my childhood memory. I was still in the Kindergarten when we learned how to play one traditional music instrument called angklung. This unique instrument can only perform a melody when it is played together with other angklung(s). Why? Because each angklung only holds one note. So, angklung is usually played by many people in an ensemble, with each person holds one instrument with one note.
Since we (at that time) did not know what musical note is, our teachers put an animal sticker on each instrument. Then they built the musical notation using the animal pictures too.
When the teacher points the picture of a duck, all children who hold the angklung with duck picture has to shake (play) their instrument. When the teacher points the bird, every kid who has the bird angklung takes their turn and shakes their angklung, and so on. That way, even some kindergartners who don't know how to read notation can perform a nice song.
This then bring me to the idea, that animals may represent notes.


Credits

All of the animal sounds are taken from:
http://www.animal-sounds.org/animal-sounds-free-download.html
http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/animal.html
Software used:
GarageBand
Wavepad Trial Edition
Windows Movie Maker

1 comment:

iscab.saptocondro said...

Pakai rumus Vitterbi aja