Bruyninckx - Listening in the field recording and the science of birdsong

Inside Technology

edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch

A list of the series appears at the back of the book.

Joeri Bruyninckx

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bruyninckx, Joeri, author.

Title: Listening in the field : recording and the science of birdsong / Joeri Bruyninckx.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2018] | Series: Inside technology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017032849 | ISBN 9780262037624 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262345392

Subjects: LCSH: Birdsongs--Recording and reproducing. | Birds--Vocalizations.

Classification: LCC QL698.5 .B79 2018 | DDC 598.159/4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032849

ePub Version 1.0

In researching and writing this book, I have accrued many debts of gratitude. My thanks go first of all to the many biologists, recordists, and archivists I have met along the way. They have welcomed me into their homes, gardens, and archives, dug up valuable documents, and taken the time to reflect on their work. In particular, Cheryl Tipp, Richard Ranft, the late Jeffery Boswall, Hans Slabbekoorn, Magnus Robb, Greg Budney and the staff of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Randy Little, Karl-Heinz Frommolt, the late Gnter Tembrock as well as his wife Sylvia, and many other field recordists at the British Wildlife Sound Recording Society and the Dutch Club voor Natuurgeluid Registratie have helped guide my investigation. The staff at the BBC Written Archives Center, the Cambridge University Library, and the Cornell University Library have kindly helped me get access to key sources.

Mentors, colleagues, and friends have sustained this project in its many iterations. This book originated as a doctoral dissertation at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University, where Wiebe Bijker and the teaching staff in the Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology program sensitized me to the many unexpected entanglements in this field. That this project came to further fruition, however, owes much to Karin Bijsterveld, who lent inspiration and direction to the project, but also shaped the contours of my scholarship and continued to support my work throughout. Dissertation committee members Jo Wachelder and Jens Lachmund have each shaped my thinking, both by example and with their keen and perceptive feedback. The ideas and direction in this book were further sharpened in exchanges with numerous peers and friends. My colleagues, old and new, in the Maastricht University STS colloquium, Summer Harvests (where researchers present work in progress), the FASOS Graduate School, and in particular the members of the Sonic Skills research group, Anna Harris, Stefan Krebs, Melissa van Drie, and Alexandra Supper, have made essential contributions as interlocutors, readers, and writing partners. They, together with Tim van der Heijden, Vincent Lagendijk, Caoilinn Hughes, Verena Anker, Fabian de Kloe, Eefje Cleophas, Bart van Oost, Ties van de Werff, Constance Sommerey and Koen Beumer, have offered valuable insights and pleasant diversions. Outside Maastricht, the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WMTC) has brought together a wonderful network of people in STS and extended my horizons. They, together with copanelists, discussants, and audiences at various colloquiums, workshops, and conferences, have impacted this work in unmistakable ways. I am also very grateful to Trevor Pinch, whose enthusiasm for the field has been inspiring. He and the faculty and graduate students in the Cornell STS department provided a most stimulating environment for me to work in. After I finished my doctorate, during a stay at the History and Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT Rosalind Williams, Stefan Helmreich, and the rest of its staff and students helped me look at this project in new ways. All the while, the Maastricht Science, Technology and Society Studies research programme, headed by Harro van Lente, has continued to be a steady intellectual home port. In its final stages, this book has been completed at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where Viktoria Tkaczyk brought together a wonderfully inspiring group of fellows as part of the research group Epistemes of Modern Acoustics. The group and the institute as a whole have provided a vibrant forum for exchange and the perfect place to finish this book. I am grateful for all of their support.

Kate Sturge has been fabulous at editing the entire manuscript. She has helped me shed unnecessary padding and own the rest. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers in various stages for their enthusiastic, thorough, and thoughtful readings of the manuscript drafts. At the MIT Press, Margy Avery, Katie Helke, Laura Keeler, Kathleen Caruso, Elizabeth Judd, and the series editors have effectively guided this project to completion. Cynthia Landeen produced an excellent index. Oxford University Press and Sage Publishers kindly granted me permission to draw on arguments I developed originally in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies and Social Studies of Science but have reworked for this book. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) have generously funded part of the research that has gone into this book. In addition, NWO and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science have helped to ensure that the book is appropriately illustrated.

Finally, family and friends have brought perspective to the writing of this book. My parents, Noortje and Robby, Dirk and Josie, have been great advocates and a source of many animated discussions on anything but birdsong. Marijke, finally, has been there all along. She has been an inexhaustible source of love, support, and common sense. Lucie arrived on the scene at the very end and as I complete these pages, she has already started to imitate the animals she encounters. Her coos and moos remind me of all those things that cannot be recorded. This book is for both of them.

On April 9, 1935, a group of five ornithologists perched on a trunk deep in the heart of the Singer Refuge, an area of swampland near Tallulah, Louisiana. The party had stopped during a fifteen-thousand-mile round-trip expedition from Upstate New York to study and collect the voices of American birds. Funded by a former Wall Street investment banker turned ornithologist, Albert Brand, and supported by the American Museum of Natural History and Cornell University, the party planned to document the lives of birds on the brink of extinction. Reports had reached them that the crowning glory of American birdlife, the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, had been spotted in these marshes. Somewhat more than a decade earlier, the head of the expedition, leading field ornithologist Arthur A. Doc Allen, had witnessed a pair of ivorybills singing, but by now advancing loggers and trigger-happy collectors among his fellow ornithologists had made such sights increasingly unusual.