Full list of quotes on bioacoustics and ecoacoustics

1. The casual reader may be interested to inquire how the efforts of a specialist in physics and communication engineering become directed to the study of insects. The answer might be that anyone who is ignorant has the obligation to seek enlightenment.

   – G. W. Pierce, 1948 The Songs of Insects _{(#physics,entomology)}

2. Pulse is surely the most ill-used term ever taken over by the bio-acoustician.

   – Broughton, 1963 Busnel _{(#terminology)}

3. Seuketat is the Eskimo word for ear-of-the-animal. This is what we must become if we want to truly listen.

   – Gordon Hempton, Earth is a Solar Powered Jukebox _(#listening)

4. How can we listen for something that we have not yet heard? We can’t. When we listen in this way, selectively, we are actually practicing controlled impairment.

   – Gordon Hempton, Earth is a Solar Powered Jukebox _(#listening)

5. The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another.

   – Warren Weaver, 1949 The Mathematical Theory of Communication _{(#communication)}

6. By the warm sunshine, and the jocund voice, Of insects—chirping out their careless lives, On these soft beds of thyme-besprinkled turf.

   – William Wordsworth, The Excursion _{(#entomology,poetry)}

7. Many of us don’t distinguish between the acts of listening and hearing.

   – Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra _(#listening)

8. I had always used my ears as filters - for shutting noise out - rather than as portals allowing large amounts of information in.

   – Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra _(#listening)

9. Sound, because it is so intimate, immediate, and physical, is probably the most influential of our senses.

   – Bernie Krause, Wild Soundscapes _(#listening)

10. A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.

    – Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra _{(#silence,anthropophony)}

11. Our problem is that sound is not important in our culture. We know the world from the visual, not from the other senses. I had to be taught other ways of understanding.

    – Bernie Krause _(#listening)

12. At intervals, some bird from out the brakes, Starts into voice a moment, then is still.

    – Lord Byron, Lake Leman _{(#ornithology,poetry)}

13. Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more. He is an evening reveller, who makes, His life an infancy, and sings his fill.

    – Lord Byron, Lake Leman _{(#entomology,poetry)}

14. Elate on the fern branch the grasshopper sings, And away in the midst of his roundelay springs.

    – Hogg, Address to a Wild Deer _{(#entomology,poetry)}

15. I heard the owls scream, and the crickets cry.

    – William Shakespeare, Macbeth _{(#entomology,ornithology,poetry)}

16. There was never a King like Solomon, Not since the world began; But Solomon talked to a butterfly, As a man would talk to a man.

    – Rudyard Kipling, The Butterfly that Stamped _{(#entomology,poetry)}

17. Then the little Hiawatha, Learned of every bird its language, Learned their names and all their secrets, How they built their nests in summer, Where they hid themselves in winter, Talked with them whene’er he met them, Called them ‘Hiawatha’s Chickens.’

    – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Haiwatha’s Childhood _{(#ornithology,poetry)}

18. As a lifelong birdwatcher I take particular delight in recording the voices of the skulking forest birds, playing their songs or calls to attract them, and the seeing them (and recording their sounds better) when they come near.

    – Murrray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar _{(#listening,ornithology)}

19. I am not sure that I would as yet advocate a museum of odors, but a museum of sound might be not only interesting, but valuable.

    – Harlan I. Smith, Science , Aug. 21, 1914, New Series, Vol. 40, No. 1025 (Aug. 21, 1914), pp. 273-274 _{(#collections,museums)}