The more aggressive live drummers I’ve seen at crowded basement gigs can generate enough noise that the other band member’s puny amplifiers simply don’t stand a chance, washed away by a wall of noise. Scientists in Japan are facing a similar problem with cicadas—while attempting to collect recording samples to assess biodiversity in Okinawa, calls of other animals have been entirely drowned out by these cryptic insects. Returning to be heard only every 13 or 17 years kind of makes them seem like some legendary noise band that drops a record, then disappears into the woodwork again.
It’s not just that cicadas are loud—if you’re unluckily directly next to one, it can cause permanent hearing damage, producing sounds up to 120 dB (incidentally, about as loud as a concert… wear your earplugs!). The other issue is that their calls take up an expansive part of the spectral range. In other words, while most birds, insects and mammals have calls that are constrained to a particular range of pitches, cicadas cover a large swath of the frequency spectrum. They have specifically designed organs that are meant to pass vibrations through tree trunks, and another body part that literally functions as an amplifier. Not unlike the body of a snare drum, which takes the rapid-fire metallic clicking of the snare on the head and boosts it.
24 hours of animal sounds: Auditory artifacts of this “cicada-like” insect can be seen across the entire audio spectrum, as seen in the second row.
Credit: Spectrogram © Michael Towsey & Anthony Truskinger, Queensland University of Technology (via Scientific American)
The pieces of the modern percussive drum kit function as a way of guiding attention while not distracting from the melodic and harmonic content of a song—the spread of their produced frequencies ensure their harmonic ambiguity. The snare is idiomatically a rhythmic anchor, an indicator of groove. The crash cymbal is an intensifier, heightening moments of transition or catharsis. These are specialized tools, but they can be overused.
New research points us to a strange conclusion. It appears species adapted to fill certain frequency ranges as much as they adapted physically to their unique environmental niches. The desire to be heard, it seems, is a universal quality. Cicadas seem to disregard all these supposed rules, however. While other animals have annual cycles of diet and migration, cicadas eschew these rituals to spend the majority of their lives underground as nymphs. When they show up again, they seem to have no sense of the boundaries of sound other species seem to implicitly respect.
A program called Sononym lets you organize a number of audio samples by key similarities: amplitude, pitch, timbre and spectrum. In a very unscientific test, I collected some samples of cicada calls, a few bird and cricket calls, as well as one-shots of cymbals, snares, and hi-hats. Unsurprisingly, within these samples, the cicada calls shared the most similarity with the snare drum and cymbal hits, while the birds and crickets were correlated more closely with the hi-hats. The program also interpreted the more constant cicada call as distortion/noise. Cicadas, ever the iconoclastic rebels. Expect this year’s cicada brood to be signed to an experimental label imminently.
Final Call — Treat Yourself to a Personalized Vinyl
A few more direct-to-vinyl recordings are available—this is your last week to grab one!
Baze Blackwood - Direct to Vinyl Session at Leesta Vall