Airway Overtones

Program Description

Our airway model, with buzzing lips and a length of PVC pipe, can be misleading. It is only when the airway is long enough and the buzzed notes high enough that the resonances of the airway limit the notes that can be trumpeted. Only some very long-necked birds like swans run into that bind. (See the program on "Coiled Tracheas".)

But most songbirds have very short airways which resonate at higher frequencies than the notes they sing. For these birds, the resonances of the airway affect the timbre of the sounds sung but don't limit their pitch.

Program & Recording Notes

The alert-guard calls of the whooping crane are from the Bring Back the Cranes media page.

The songs of the brown-headed cowbird, the Western tanager, and the American robin are from the CD collection Bird Songs of California produced by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

I slowed the cowbird's song by 4 times and the other songs by half using Bias Peak.

The buzzing lips and the tones of the lengths of PVC pipe are from the brass acoustics page of Joe Wolfe's wonderful music acoustics website at The University of New South Wales.

Series 3
Egg Calls
Chick ID Calls
Chicken Calls
Vocal Tract
Syrinx Styles
Airway Model
Airway Overtones
Coiled Trachea
Beak & Airway
Vowels & Airway
Tuvan Throat Singing
Whistling

Series 4
Size & Sound
Forest Soundscape
Grassland Soundscape
Bird Hearing
Local Dialects
Regional Dialects
Drumming - Woodpeckers Etc.
Bird Tongues
Bird Brains & Singing
Song Duels?
Dawn Chorus
Finale: Song Sparrow