With the growth of the country’s population, the sounds and lives of animals can go unnoticed. Capturing these sounds gives more information for different species that are missing in every day life.
“Our long term goal is to gather representative sounds of the vertebral species in the western United States,” said Jeff Rice, a research librarian at the U.
Rice, with help from the Marriott Library, aims to capture the unique sounds of animals from Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada and other nearby states. The sounds are placed on the Western Soundscapes Archive, a digital archive at the library.
“I want people to pay attention to the sounds that are around them,” Rice said.
Almost a year into the project, Rice and his colleagues have around 800 animal sounds on their Web site and 400 more waiting to be uploaded onto the site. They will also feature soundscapes from the different habitats.
“I think it kind of sounds interesting, it would be fun to check it out,” said Dave Korzep, a freshman in English.
Rice said the archive has around 70 percent of the bird population and 80 percent of different frog and toad species. It also has some mammals and reptiles recorded, but there is still more work to be done.
“We’re still organizing the site and have a ways to go, but we want people to be able to experience these places through sound,” Rice said.
Kenni Arlitsch, associate librarian of Marriott Library Operations, said when the project was beginning, they were going to just record sounds of different animals. He thought they should instead create a digital library giving students and faculty at the U, and anyone else interested, access to these unique sounds.
The project began about a year ago, but has a few more years before it will be complete.
The library collects the sounds and formats them for viewers to access online, Arlitsch said.
The Web site accompanies the sound of the animal with facts and links to other information. The project also aims to show that the environments the animals live in are also changing.
“We all understand that landscapes change over time,” Arlitsch said. “What we don’t always realize is that it also changes the soundscape.”
The archives will help identify unknown sounds and the animals that make them.
“What we are trying to do with our Web site is to expose people to a variety of sounds,” Rice said. “And that the animals are really in their own backyards.”
Rice has received contributions from volunteers and other organizations.
“We get a lot of recordings that are donated and a portion I record myself,” Rice said. “I could not have possibly recorded all of these sounds by myself.”