• Members of the previous forum can retrieve their temporary password here, (login and check your PM).

Cricket Chirps Scaled down to Human Lifespan, WOW

Migrated topic.
VERYCOOL! wonder if small things like crickets hear in slower motion?
Quincidentally, i toasted a piece of bread with red mold on it today,
and ii noticed one of the mold spots looked exactly like a cricket!
 
I've seen this before and tried to replicate it by taking several different recordings of crickets and applying algorithms that stretch sounds in time domain. (I dabble in audio engineering and digital signal processing)

I was unable to produce anything that sound remotely like the recording, even after trying to, which leads me to believe it's a hoax. I even tried slowing down the original track (because it contains normal-speed crickets), to see if it was just the kind of crickets I had, but no luck…

It's cool, but my expert opinion is that the story behind the song is untrue. Stretching sounds by that much produce much 'smoother' sounds, i.e. check out this Justin Bieber song at only 8x slower:

It's unlikely that any recording (especially at normal sample rates) would have the time-domain resolution to sound anything like the cricket song once it was slowed down as much as stated in the article. The best I could get sounded like dogs barking in the distance...
 
Snopes: God's Chorus of Crickets


Critics contend that Wilson didn't simply slow down a continuous recording of crickets chirping; they interpret his statement that he "slowed down this recording to various levels" and Bonnie Joe Hunt's reference to Wilson's "lowering the pitch" several times to mean that he used multiple recordings of crickets, each slowed down by a different amount to produce a specific pitch, and layered them to create a melodic effect sounding like a "well-trained church choir."
Click to expand...

So in other words, each different note 'sang' by the crickets could actually just be different copies of the original recording, each slowed to a different speed to create different pitches - then the creator simply played each recording like a virtual instrument, as one can easily do with software - to make a song.


That's what I lean towards, but, I do dig the music regardless.
 
Back
Top Bottom