1915 J Saunders, Recording Bird Songs. • 177 



notes that are separated by a whole tone. The unit of time is not 

 the measure, further modified by the addition of adagios, allegros 

 or numbers signifying beats per minute, but is the second, a unit 

 that is uniform and unchanging, and thoroughly understood both 

 by musicians and by the uninitiated. The second may be further 

 divided into fifths, the smallest unit that can be recorded by an 

 ordinary stop watch. I have found that in practise it is still better 

 to divide it into tenths, so that short, rapidly repeated notes may 

 be easily represented, and lengths of songs may be expressed in 

 decimals. 



In putting this method into practise, I have found a few modifica- 

 tions from the definite rules necessary in order to record the char- 

 acters of all songs clearly. A rest, or pause in a song would of 

 course be represented by a break in the horizontal continuity of 

 the lines representing it. Many bird songs, particularly those of 

 the sparrows, contain series of short, rapidly repeated notes all on 

 the same pitch, without a pause between them. If the method 

 were rigidly adhered to, these would be represented by a continuous 

 straight line, and the separate notes could not be distinguished. 

 In order to avoid this I have written such songs with a slight break 

 in the horizontal lines to keep the distinct notes separate, although 

 there is really no pause in the song. When such notes become so 

 rapid that the number cannot be counted, the note becomes a trill. 

 I have represented trills by continuous, slightly wavy lines, the 

 wave not representing any variation in pitch, but the pitch of the 

 note being recorded by the central axis of the wavy line. These 

 conditions are shown in the illustrations of songs of the Song and 

 Field Sparrows. 



The illustrations will suffice to make more clear the graphic 

 method of recording songs. I have used the letters C, C", C", 

 etc., to indicate middle C and the octaves above it. Where notes 

 on different pitches are slurred together, I have represented this 

 fact by connecting them by an almost vertical line. Such slurs 

 are characteristic of the Meadowlark's song (fig. 7) ^.nd are also 

 found in the introductory notes of the Field Sparrow record (fig. 2). 

 One criticism of my method that has been made is that all 

 notes are not connected by these vertical lines, to give the 

 songs more continuity of appearance. This would make it diffi- 



