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Occasional posts on subjects like field recording, London sounds past and present, other websites worth looking at, articles in the press, and news of sound-related events.

Voices of animals and men

Posted by IMR on 08 January 2010

FOLLOWING ON FROM an earlier post about budgerigars, I was listening recently to this CD produced by the British Library Sound Archive:

Most of the recordings on the CD are of wild birds imitating other bird species. There’s also one of a raven saying ‘hello’ and a blackbird mimicking a dial-up modem, now an obsolete sound and probably not one that many people will miss. Parrot-like birds are represented by Sparkie Williams, the champion talking budgie of 1950s Britain.

Only birds can reliably mimic human speech. In the 1970s a dog called Prince achieved brief fame after appearing on the BBC’s That’s Life program, where he growled a few indistinct sounds that could be taken as words if you were in a believing mood. As you can see, he also had some help from his owner:

There is one genuine example of a non-human mammal producing human speech sounds and a few short recordings survive of it.

If you enjoy the unsettling feeling of some of your mental categories being undermined then listen to these recordings of Hoover the talking seal:

Hoover had been found by a Maine fisherman as a pup, swiftly outgrew his new home, and ended up in the New England Aquarium in Boston, where this webpage commemorates his residency. By chance Hoover also came to the attention of the neuroscientist Terrence Deacon. As Deacon recalls in his book The Symbolic Species:

We were passing in front of the Boston Aquarium when a gravelly voice yelled out, “Hey! Hey! Get outa there!” . . . It now sounded a bit thick-tongued. Perhaps it was the half-conscious territorial threat of a wine-drinking vagrant sitting in a dark corner.

Deacon was able to study Hoover with the help of an undergraduate student, videoing and recording his utterances and other behaviour. The seal was sickly compared to its fellows at the aquarium, and fell ill and died a little over a year later. During the autopsy a veterinarian noted that Hoover’s cranium was calcified to an unusual degree, probably as the result of early encephalitis or other brain damage.

Deacon never tracked down the whereabouts of Hoover’s brain to examine it for himself, and he says the case ‘remains open and unclosed’.