The Macaulay Library is the world's largest

archive An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

animal sound Certain words in the English language represent animal sounds: the noises and vocalizations of particular animals, especially noises used by animals for communication. The words can be used as verbs or interjections in addition to nouns, and ma ...

s. It includes more than 33 million

photograph A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now create ...

s, 1.2 million

audio recording Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording te ...

s, and over two hundred thousand videos covering 96 percent of the world's

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweigh ...

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

. There are an ever-increasing numbers of

insect Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs ...

fish Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of li ...

frog A frog is any member of a diverse and largely Carnivore, carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order (biology), order Anura (ανοὐρά, literally ''without tail'' in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-f ...

, and

mammal Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or ...

recordings. The Library is part of

Cornell Lab of Ornithology The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a member-supported unit of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, which studies birds and other wildlife. It is housed in the Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity in Sapsucker Woods Sanctuar ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

History

Arthur Augustus Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg made the first recordings of bird sound on May 18, 1929 in an Ithaca park. They used motion-picture film with synchronized sound to record a

song sparrow The song sparrow (''Melospiza melodia'') is a medium-sized New World sparrow. Among the native sparrows in North America, it is easily one of the most abundant, variable and adaptable species. Description Adult song sparrows have brown upperp ...

, a

house wren The house wren (''Troglodytes aedon'') is a very small bird of the wren family, Troglodytidae. It occurs from Canada to southernmost South America, and is thus the most widely distributed native bird in the Americas. It occurs in most suburban ar ...

, and a

rose-breasted grosbeak The rose-breasted grosbeak (''Pheucticus ludovicianus''), colloquially called "cut-throat" due to its coloration, is a large, seed-eating grosbeak in the cardinal family ( Cardinalidae). It is primarily a foliage gleaner. Males have black heads, ...

. This was the Beginning of Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Graduate student

Albert R. Brand Albert Rich Brand (October 22, 1889 – March 28, 1940) was an author and innovator in the recording of bird songs. Herbert J. Seligmann wrote ''Man and Bird Together: A Portrait of Albert R. Brand'' about him. He was a stockbroker until age 39. A ...

and Cornell undergraduate M. Peter Keane developed recording equipment for use in the open field. In the next two years they had successfully recorded more than 40 species of birds. In 1931 Peter Keane and True McLean (a Cornell professor in

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

) designed and built a

parabolic reflector A parabolic (or paraboloid or paraboloidal) reflector (or dish or mirror) is a reflective surface used to collect or project energy such as light, sound, or radio waves. Its shape is part of a circular paraboloid, that is, the surface generated ...

for field recordings of bird songs. They used

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

parabola molds from the Cornell Physics Department. In 1940 Albert R. Brand produced an extensive bird song field guide album “American Bird Songs”. The sales of

phonograph A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...

records of bird sounds remained a key source of income for the Lab of Ornithology since these days. In 2020 the

Internet Bird Collection Lynx Edicions is a Spanish publishing company specializing in ornithology and natural history. History Lynx Edicions was founded in Barcelona by , a lawyer and collector; , a naturalist; and , a medical doctor and writer. Since 2002, the company ...

(IBC) was incorporated into the Macaulay Library, which now hosts all of the content contained in the IBC.

Recording Data

The basic data of the modern recordings contains: #Species name #Date #Time of day #Location #GPS coordinates #Behavioral context of sound #Natural sound or response to playback. If playback was used announce this on tape. #Number of individuals #Habitat description #Weather (e.g. degree of overcast, air temperature, water temperature (important for amphibian recordings.) #Recording equipment-Audio recorder make and model; microphone make and model; if used filter positions #Distance to animal

Name

The name of Macaulay Library honoring Linda and William (Bill) Macaulay, which donated a significant campaign contribution to fund the new facility (2003) of the library at Sapsucker Woods. Linda Macaulay added also nearly 6,000 individual birdsong recordings of over 2,600 species.

References

{{Authority control Cornell University Science libraries in the United States Collecting Collections Bird sounds University and college academic libraries in the United States

History

Recording Data

Name

See also

References