Exploring Dialect through Song Variability in Tufted Titmice
The first thing I did was read everything I could get my hands on about Tufted Titmice to better understand their habits. After accomplishing this, I built a parabolic microphone, realized the mp3 player wasn’t strong enough to pick up on bird song, downloaded a shareware audio editing program, took my laptop with me to the field to record birds, didn’t record a single Tufted Titmouse, and gave up and headed to the internet. I utilized Cornell University’s Macaulay Library of Sound to acquire samples of Tufted Titmice vocalizations from across the Eastern and Gulf states, resulting in a change of my hypothesis.
I used Audacity, the shareware audio editing program I downloaded, to create sound clips of Tufted Titmice songs. These songs were fed to RAVEN, a sound analysis program developed by Cornell University. RAVEN created sonographs, or pictures of sound, for each song clip, and measured a variety of variables for each sonograph. Sonographs were used for visual, qualitative comparison between birds, while the measurements were given to a professor for assistance and use of R for statistical analysis.
I learned that science doesn’t always go as you planned. Nearly every stop of the way, I had to change something, fix something, or backtrack and try again. And that was before I even got to analyze the data!
In terms of my actual research, both the qualitative, visual analysis and the quantitative, statistical analysis revealed that Tufted Titmice show regional dialect, varying between Texas, the Southeast, the Central East, and the North East. However, it was unclear whether the dialect showed a continuous pattern, wherein the dialect fed seamlessly from one region to connecting regions, or if Tufted Titmice exhibit a discrete pattern, where there are distinct borders and barriers between regions.
My findings are important because they support one of the theories of dialect formation, and because a dialectic study had not yet been done for the Tufted Titmice. Personally, this project was important because I learned to work through unexpected roadblocks as well as to pace myself in doing an entire experiment from start to finish.
RAVEN Sound Analysis Software |
$100.00 |
Toshiba mp3 Player |
$69.00 |
Parabolic Microscope |
$101.85 |
Interlibrary Loans |
$12.00 |
Microfilm Printing |
$2.50 |
Poster |
$8.85 |
TOTAL |
$294.20 |