crickets

I found this some time ago and it is really… something (can't decide between creepy and beautiful… maybe both)…

https://soundcloud.com/acornavi/jim-wilson-crickets-audio

(I caught myself to listen to the whole track… few times )

Nice indeed!

Unfortunately this is fake.

A complete fabrication.

Aah - fooled me.

Any real Refrence for the fraud? - can't really get anything solid out of google on this topic..

Jakob

Just loaded up an assortment of cricket sounds and pitched and flipped etc. Couldnt get that chordal seq happening.

Went to the website and recorded the first few seconds of clean crickets, still no joy after pitching and manipulation.


If you listen carefully to the track, there are 3 prominent layers happening:

1. The high pitched 'metallic squeaks' for a better term. I used a LP filter with a 48 db slope and they are eliminated at 3.4kHz

2. The mid range 'chirps' which disappear at 1.5kHz on the LPF.

3. Then the low end melody is clearly heard.

4. There is also a layer of ambient low-end noise that is eliminated with a HP filter at 160Hz.

I think that crickets are used as the main source but have been played and processed......

Nice to try in Kontakt once I have some time

Snopes is very generous giving it a "mixed" rating...

http://www.snopes.com/critters/gnus/cricketsong.asp

-But the real trick is almost certainly described at the end:

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...

Certainly, the recording has been around for quite a while, but only recently (within the last couple of years) have I seen the added text that this only occurs when it is slowed down by an 'absurd' amount (slowed by something like 200 times, I seem to recall). -If it really WAS slowed down by 192 times, frequencies  in the ~1kHz region would have to have been captured at 200kHz. Information at 3kHz would have to have been recorded at 600kHz This gives the lie to the whole thing of course...

Yes, we WANT to believe that insects "sing" in a reverential manner, and that stunning beauty lies beyond our perception... and this is why we so readily fall for this trick.

For the truth, you don't have to slow anything down. -Just listen to crickets. -They tend to chirp at a single note. -In fact there is a formula to tell you the temperature by the center frequency of this note, and it has been long known.

For the crickets to sing a "scale", either the long-known formula would have to be nonsense, or someone has manipulated the crickets. A sampler is easy to do, and you can -very truthfully- tell people that "all you're hearing is crickets slowed down" and be telling the technical truth. -It sounds beautiful, and people then are sufficiently impressed to remember it, and repeat tales of the "beauty".

But it's a deception, unfortunately... -well, the "scale" or "Melody" is. -Slowed-down crickets to me do indeed sound beautiful, but then so do regular-speed crickets. (unless I'm trying to record an acoustic guitar outside at night!)

Keef

On the "speed ratio" the nonsense tale being circulated says that the amount of slowing down is that of the proportion of a human lifespan to a cricket lifespan.

Since the average cricket lives for about a month (there are many varieties, and spans vary) and if we're exceptionally generous and say that the average human lives to only fifty years (given that reckoning, by rights most or all of my friends should be dead already!) then we have a ratio of 50 x 12 which is 600:1.

3kHz at 600:1 would be a 1.8MHz bandwidth recording.

Utter nonsense.

Crickets suck, but IIRC are considered lucky in some cultures (china?). I recall as a kid my bedroom was in the basement and crickets would get into the house and keep me awake at night until I could find and silence them. This year I have been seeing lots of crickets in the yard... so far none in this house.

The temperature relationship is wrt the chirp rep rate not pitch. (see Dolbear's law).

There are other ways to shift pitch besides playback speed.

JR

Thanks for the correction. So it's the 'cluster' repetition, not the note.

incredible... they fooled me too.  :
... and its nice to hear very logical explanation of this fraud

SSLtech said:

Thanks for the correction. So it's the 'cluster' repetition, not the note.

Click to expand...

One thing I wanted to do while sitting around a friends swimming pool in the evening when the nearby frogs would compete with each other to be louder and lower pitch. With the frogs the pitch was generally a marker for size, the bigger the frog the lower and louder the croak. I wanted to capture each frog vocalization, shift the pitch down, make it louder and play it back at them.

That way the frogs would shut up thinking a bigger badder frog was in the area.  ;D

JR