My grandparents lived very long lives. My mother's father was born in 1893, grew up on a sheep ranch in Australia, fought for the British in World War I, suffered numerous life-threatening calamities and collisions as a semi-professional adventurer, and lived 86 years. My father's parents both lived to the age of 96. And my mother's mother lived to be more than 100 years old. She was a professional musician who played in the big bands, backing movies like Abbott and Costello's Here Come the Co-eds and played most famously in Phil Spitalny's Hour of Charm All Girl Orchestra, chronicled in the book Swing Shift. (Sadly that book was written after the memories of most of the sources had begun to degrade.)
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SUCCESS: Spectrogram of Bat Calls, to 48 kHz
(Credit: Michael Tiemann)I don't know about you, but there was a lot of excitement at the Tiemann household when this image popped up on the screen. It meant that nights of field work, evenings of programming, and a weekend of multimedia production all pointed at one, inescapable conclusion: my crazy bat project was a SUCCESS and the promise I made to my daughter was KEPT!!
First things first. If you have been following this blog, you know that a week ago I had the crazy idea of trying to record bats. After finally having an opportunity to use my aforementioned SONY PMC-D1, and after spending another few hours trying to convince myself I had captured something, in the end I felt a bit like one of the members of the Warren Commission looking at the Zapruder film and asking "you want me to make a finding based on this?" If I was going to convince my daughter that we had, in fact, captured and identified bat sounds beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was going to take more than a few suspicious noises of post-processed audio before I could be satisfied that the burden of proof could be met. In the days after my first blog posting, things were looking fairly bleak for the project, but I was determined to prove that with a little technology (a little more than you might suspect), I could, in fact, make good.
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I enjoy walking my dog (a Shiba Inu) with my daughter, especially when the weather is pleasant. Earlier this week it was a particularly pleasant evening in Chapel Hill: the sweet air was cool like nighttime in summer, but the sun had at least 10 minutes to go before setting. All of a sudden, we both saw a bat swoop around a street lamp, eagerly pursuing its evening meal.
"IT'S A BAT!" my daughter exclaimed.
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