Animal Planet: Google Earth to Get Creature Sounds

A California company has created a map overlay for Google Earth that embeds animal sounds into the relevant locations in Google Earth.

“Bernie Krause has spent 40 years collecting over 3500 hours of sound recordings from all over the world, including bird and whale song and the crackle of melting glaciers. His company, Wild Sanctuary in Glen Ellen, California, has now created software to embed these sound files into the relevant locations in Google Earth. Just zoom in on your chosen spot and listen to local sounds….He hopes it will make virtual visitors more aware of the impact of human activity on the environment in the years since he began making and collecting the recordings. Users will be able to hear various modern-day sounds at a particular location, then travel back in time to compare them with the noises of decades gone by.Krause plans to have the software ready with 26 sounds for demonstration at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, on 29 May. It will also be available for download from www.wildsanctuary.com on that date, and many more sounds will follow.“

Kraus’ sound library seems to be similar to Cornell’s Macaulay library, which has sound recordings for 67 percent of the world’s birds, and which my friend Apurva Narechania wrote about for The American Scholar in 2005.

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