Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx Rachel Mundy (bio) Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong By Joeri Bruyninckx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. 256. Listening in the Field offers a narrowly focused and deeply researched history of sound recording's impact on avian bio-acoustics from 1880 to 1980. The book examines a century of recording technology used to document birdsong in the United States and Europe, with analog sound recording at its center. No mere historical surveyist, Bruyninckx takes his reader from songbird research into much broader questions about how data gets made, and how and when technology is part of that process. [End Page 243] Starting with music notation and moving through magnetic tape recording, Listening in the Field explores the study of birds through the lens—or rather, filter—of a century of analog sound recording. Bruyninckx starts his story in the phonograph era and concludes it with the advent of digital sound recording in the 1980s. The result is a compact, linear narrative about the science of birdsong that parallels developments in analog audio technology. Yet in addition to exploring the history of avian bioacoustics, Bruyninckx uses that history as a case study in the interplay between sound and sight as scientists standardize and debate what evidence should sound and look like. These topics are structured through five chapters and a conclusion that explore the relationship between avian bioacoustics, sound recording, and visual evidence. Organized chronologically, the pages traverse technologies of sound transcription that range from musical notations of birdsong in the 1880s to printed spectrographic images in the 1970s. Chapter 1, "Eavesdropping in the Wild," lays out the structure of the book and frames its central question, "What does it take for an ephemeral sound, a faint cry, to be registered under the unsympathetic circumstances of field research, and to be recognized as an object of scientific evidence?" (p. 3). Chapter 2 turns to the experimental transcriptions that shaped studies of birdsong from the 1880s until the 1930s. While this topic has been analyzed elsewhere by authors such as Emily Doolittle and David Rothenberg, Bruyninckx contrasts it with the "sterile" aesthetic that emerged with mobile sound recording equipment in the 1930s (ch. 3). The third chapter incidentally includes a wonderfully detailed history of Cornell University's avian bioacoustics program and sound library. In chapter 4, Bruyninckx explores the criteria dividing amateur from professional listeners in "citizen science" programs like Cornell's, and in chapter 5, he demonstrates the negotiation between aural and visual media that characterized "professional" ornithological uses of the sound spectrograph. It is in the fifth chapter that Bruyninckx hits his stride as a historian of science, drawing out the ambiguities that characterize the making of science through the story of the sound spectrograph, a mechanical ear that supplemented human listeners in avian bioacoustics. Bruyninckx shows how ornithologists who adopted the tool balanced quantitative data with qualitative decision-making about what counted as a phrase, a syllable, or a song. While the book lends itself to cumulative reading, this is a chapter that would be particularly well suited as an excerpt for interested readers in the history of science, sound studies, or related fields. As a study in evidence, the book shows how "scientific recordings were never only scientific objects." Any reader interested in birdsong will be delighted by the depth of historical research in this book. At times, I wished its analysis of evidence did more, particularly as this deconstructive trope has been applied elsewhere in science and technology studies with more attention to social context. That "something more" begins to emerge in the [End Page 244] conclusion, however, which notes that the "noise" that is routinely removed from bioacoustic recordings of birds is, in fact, an important fact in birds' lives, one with substantial ecological and environmental implications. Listening in the Field is one of the best books of its kind, exploring an engaging and timely topic with a winning combination of focused research and pointed insights to show us the best of what the history of science has to offer. It will be a welcome read...