Bullfrogs in stereo (Shallow Thoughts)

Bullfrogs in stereo

The Walden West pond is hopping -- literally! This afternoon around 3pm the pond's resident bullfrogs, who normally just float quietly in the scum on the surface, would suddenly hop out of the water for no obvious reason, then settle back down a few feet away. One pair was apparently mating like that, the larger frog hopping onto the back of the smaller frog, then immediately off again. And the pond was full of sound, sometimes with two or more frogs booming at once. Bullfrogs in stereo!

I didn't have the SLR along, but some of the frogs were close enough (and calm enough not to submerge when we got near them) that I was able to get a few decent shots.

But I really wanted to capture that sound. So I put the camera in video mode and shot a series of videos hoping to catch some of the music ... and did. They sound like this: bullfrog (mp3, 24kb).

Despite the title of this entry, the recording doesn't have any interesting stereo effects; the only microphone was the one built in to my Canon A540. It did okay, though! You'll just have to use your imagination to place two frogs as you listen, one 20 feet to the left and the other 15 feet to the right.

How to extract the audio from a camera video

(Non open source people can quit reading here.)

Extracting the audio was a little tricky. I found lots of pages ostensibly telling me how to do it with mencoder, but none of them seemed to work. This did:

mplayer -vc null -af volume=15 -vo null -ao pcm -benchmark mvi_8992.avi

I added that -af volume=15 argument to make the sound louder, since it was a bit quiet as it came from the camera.

That produced a file named audiodump.wav, which I turned into an mp3 like this:

lame audiodump.wav bullfrogs.mp3

Tags: nature, bullfrog, linux, audio
[ 21:42 Jun 03, 2009    More nature | permalink to this entry | ]