{"id":431,"date":"2020-11-26T17:17:14","date_gmt":"2020-11-26T17:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/earwitness.me\/?p=431"},"modified":"2021-02-04T21:37:15","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T21:37:15","slug":"the-amazon-soundscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earwitness.me\/?p=431","title":{"rendered":"The Amazon Soundscape"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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…Bio-Acoustic niche or what environment can tell us through sound<\/strong>…<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The first noticeable aspect of Amazonian rainforest for the visitors is perhaps the strikingly high number of the living creatures compared to proportion of the area. You just have to point towards a direction and you will notice something moving! There are even some plant species that live on the surface of the fast and powerful Amazon river current. The Amazon rainforest alone hosts around 10 percent of the world’s known species and it only occupies around 1 percent of the total area of earth\u2019s surface! Just imagine the fact that many of these animals are communicating through sound! This makes the rainforest a very rich and diverse acoustic environment in which finding a safe or less occupied sonic niche among a busy time\/frequency spectrum is of crucial importance. Failure to find a safe communicational bandwidth may put the species in danger of extinction due to the fact that most of the sound-producing animals use this ability in order to transmit various important informational cues such as mating calls or territorial claims. As a result, in healthy and unaltered habitats, many birds, mammals and amphibians have learned to vocalize in a sonic niche not occupied by less mobile creatures such as near-ranging insects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In his essay \u201cThe Niche Hypothesis\u201d, <\/strong>Dr. Bernie Krause an American musician and soundscape ecologist argues that examining the voice of any natural habitat (Bio-Acoustic spectrum) as a whole sheds light on many important aspects that could be overlooked if we try to abstract the voice of a single creature from its habitat and try to understand it out of the context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>Taking a giant leap when considering the habitat as a whole, the sounds of each of these zones are so unique and important to creature life in a given location, if one creature
stops vocalizing, another immediately joins the chorus to keep that audio bio-spectrum intact. An audio bio-spectrum is a acoustical spectrographic mapping of any particular habitat by frequency (pitch, sometimes tone) and amplitude (loudness) over short periods of time. Territory is now defined in dimensions well beyond the 3-D topographical. In younger habitats birds and mammals will occupy only one niche at a time. However, in older environments, some tropical rainforest animal vocalizations, like the Asian paradise flycatcher (Terpsiphone paradisi), are so highly specialized that their voices occupy several niches of the audio biospectrum at the same time thus laying territorial claim to several audio channels. From our observations of the Asian paradise flycatcher, we suspect that we will soon be able to utilize this acoustical methodology to help determine the age of certain habitats.[1]<\/sup ><\/a>Krause, Bernie. The Niche Hypothesis: A Virtual Symphony of Animal Sounds, the Origins of Musical Expression and the Health of Habitats<\/em>. 6 June 1993, p. 5. researchgate.net<\/a><\/em>.
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