March 16, 2024

Not the most exiting night recording the field in Olalla, but I did catch a distant coyote party, and I thought it would be good to show what Audition can do to help isolate the sound for experimentation. Using the Marquee Selection Tool in this spectrogram view, I can actually select the frequency range I want to hear, and it will do a hard band-pass filter on the selection, so I hear nothing BUT the selected frequency range. A glance at the Audition documentation left me wanting for a bit more detail in how the filtering was happening. At any rate, check out the image: you can see faint coyote 'song' in the middle, between 600 and 1800 Hz, with dogs barking below 600, frogs croaking above 1800. It still surprises me when you see animals keeping their own 'slots' in the spectrum. You'll hear the unfiltered audio up to the 30 second mark, then the hard-filtered result in the second half. You don't really lose any information as to the sound the coyotes made, but it's kind of disorienting to my ears to suddenly hear all that frequency range go away. Link to the post.