Years ago (1970s I think) I bought for my mother an LP which played bird songs slowed down to various speeds with commentaries. Of course it is long gone, but I would love to have something similar just for the regular garden song birds. I've written to the RSPB but they say they have nothing. On the JREF MB one poster (a music expert whose mother used to do a lot with RSPB) suggested downloading some software (Audacity) which enables things to be played at slower speeds. I checked with Dolphin and it would be compatible with Supernova, but my computer teacher had a look at the website and you have to do this, then that, click here and there and I just can't manage that, even using the magnification which Supernova provides.

So I was wondering if anyone knows of any recordings of slowed-down bird songs? On Sunday I heard a blackcap singing - lovely. It sounded a bit like a wren to start with, but then I realised it was a warbler.

Try http://www.wildsong.demon.co.uk/LR/listening.html, for instance.

SusanDoris

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/birdsong.shtml

 

This thread has made me pay careful attention to birdsong as I've been walking to work (and working in the garden). Aren't birds brilliant?
I always thought it might be interesting to compare Messiaen's transcriptions with birdsong (if you could not only slow it down but expand the intervals as he says he does). Anyone done it?

The arrival of Baziron has caused me to think of Janequin's Chant des Oiseaux.
'Gerhart
'art thou come forth out of Phlegethon?
'with Buxtehude and Klages in your satchel, with the
'Ständebuch of Sachs in yr/luggage
'-not of one bird but of many'
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXV

In the 1970s I taped some blackbird songs at seven and a half IPS on my Dad's old Philips reel-to-reel and played them back at one-end-seven-eighths. The result was fascinating. I consider blackbirds to be far more interesting natural musicians than humans! I regard bird song as the most beautiful sound outside composed music.

It's not widely-known that Arnold Schoenberg once transcribed nightingale songs into written  notation .  A manuscript of 5 August 1912  is annotated ' Much higher than piccolo, C frequently occurs . Tne principal tones come from the chord Bflat,D,F,Aflat'.

I sometimes wish I had made an effort to keep everything, but frequent home-moves and a spouse who likes chucking out anything not used in the last six months have put pai to that.

Among the things I regret disposing of are a complete 'Apostles 'with Sargent conducting (and Owen Branngan a marvellous Judas!) and Thurston Dart's set of 'Early English Keyboard Music' on Oiseau-Lyre LPs.

My next door neighbour used to whistle in the garden a lot and a blackbird picked it up.
He died quite suddenly while I was up at university, and I had a strange moment when I came down in the holiday, hearing him whistling in the garden. Once I'd worked out it was the blackbird, I thought about how nice that is. Potentially, that blackbird will pass it on to its offspring and so on, and it will evolve, but it's a contribution to what you might call 'the oral history of the blackbird'.