tracks

Suburban Sounds (Crickets And Temperature; Crickets Chirp At Slow Speed)
Insect Flight (Inside A Hornet; Pre-Flight Warm-Up; Fatigue Experiment)
Insect Flight (Wing-Beat Vs. Load; Flight-Light Experiment; In A Hornet Nest)
Flying Insects (Mosquitoes; Bumble Bee; May Beetle; Japanese Beetle; Warble-Fly; Flowerfly; European Hornet)
Cicada Warm-Up And Flight (Tent Caterpillar Moth; Underwing Moth; Large Long-Horn Beetle Screaming; Click Beetles)
Wasp Chewing (False Katydid; Cicada Song; Cicada And Plane; Evening Insects)
Katydids
Longhorn Beetle Walking
Small Longhorn Beetle Shriek
Viceroy Butterfly Walking
Viceroy Butterfly In Flight
Harpalus Beetle Walking
Fly Caught On Flypaper
Underwing Moth Walking
Grape-Leaf Beetle Walking
Dragonfly In Flight
Mud-Dauber Wasp Flight
Crabre Argus (Wasp) In Nest
Hover Fly
Deerfly (Chrysops Niger)
Deerfly (Chrysops Vitatus)
Japanese Beetles On A Rose
Drone Fly (Eristalis)
Bumblebee (Two Toned Flight)
Cicada Song
Spider (Salticus Sp.) Walking

notes

Full track details and liner notes are avalible as a PDF file on this disc.
Housed in gatefold slip-case w/Smithsonian Folkways Thank You postcard.

Reissued as part of the "Smithsonian Folkways Archival" series.
"Recording Data on Insect Sounds:
Wherever there is motion, some of the energy of the motion is liable to be transmuted to sound energy. Even though most of the insects are small, their motions can produce sounds. Some of the sounds are of such low amplitude that they remain inaudible to us without amplification; other sounds made by insects may be loud enough to become annoying.

Wing beat tones, and other of the audible insect sounds were picked up directly by an Astatic 77 dynamic cardioid microphone. The internal sounds of the activity of insect flight muscles were picked up through a special probe affixed to RCA 5734 electro-mechanical transducer tube feeding into a specially built preamp. The most troublesome sounds to record proved to be those of insect footsteps. The specimens either clung to the protective mesh on the microphone , or they scampered or flew away too quickly to obtain a useable recording . Attempts were made with paper and with aluminum foil attached to a wire "needle" in a phono cartridge; further attempts were made with a specially built ribbon microphone, large enough for the insects to walk on the ribbon, but the results were poor.

The footsteps recorded here were achieved by placing the specimens in a small cardboard box, whose bottom was replaced by a tightly stretched sheet of tissue paper. This was placed with the tissue paper only a fraction of an inch from the dynamic microphone. In effect this provided a double diaphragm of the microphone itself - and the results were not only loud and clear, but they sounded alike each time the same insect was permitted to walk. Many of the sounds included on this record were fed into specially designed preamplifier circuits, and thence to a 20-watt Williamson type amplifier. Output was fed to a VM model 711 tape recorder operating at 7 1/2 IPS, and recorded on Scotch brand 111 A 12 magnetic tape."

<a href=http://www.discogs.com/No-Artist-Sounds-Of-Insects/release/818131>Original vinyl LP issued by Folkways Records & Scholastic Records, © 1960</a>.

credits

Design [Cover] – Ronald Clyne
Recorded By, Edited By, Liner Notes [Annotated By] – Albro T. Gaul

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