Journal ArticleDOI
A Biosemiotic and Ecoacoustic History of Bird-Scaring
TLDR
In this article, a historical account of bird-scaring practices is presented in three sections, demarcated by changes in technology as well as shifts in the mode of semiotic reference.Abstract:
Timo Maran has defined “biosemiotic criticism” as the study of human culture with an emphasis on the recognition that all forms of life are organized by sign processes. That approach guides this investigation of the sonic devices and practices that have been used in encounters between birds and humans in agricultural spaces. “Bird-scaring” has been a long-standing component of the semiotic relationship between humans and birds in what I am calling the agricultural semiosphere. The struggle between humans and “pest” species over the control of agricultural resources has spurred technological development, and an examination of the sonic tools that have been involved in bird-scaring practices, from wooden rattles to digital sound recordings, intersects with scholarship on sound technology and media studies. The field of ecoacoustics provides a conceptual framework for the sonic dynamics of the interspecies communication under examination. To the extent that the essay also explores the sign relations between humans and birds it has a place in the growing corpus of biosemiotic criticism. The historical account of bird-scaring practices is presented in three sections, demarcated by changes in technology as well as shifts in the mode of semiotic reference. Across the analysis, a historical approach to bird-scaring is interwoven with a discussion of biosemiotic and ecoacoustic themes and concepts.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Mimetic Dimensions of Bird-Human Interactions: The Use of Bird Sound Imitations among Estonian Birders
TL;DR: In this paper , a survey was conducted among Estonian birders to find out about the prevalence of the practice, the diversity of imitated species, the means of imitation, and the attitudes of birders towards the use of recordings in the field.
References
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Book
Elements of Semiology
TL;DR: Semi-Linguistics is a tentative science as discussed by the authors, which aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification.
Book
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World
TL;DR: Schafer advocates soundscape study, or interdisciplinary research on the sonic environment that combines science, society, and the arts as mentioned in this paper, and gives an historical overview of the changing soundscape, from a graceful state of nature to a heavily industrialised society filled with noise pollution.
Book
The Evolution of Communication
TL;DR: The argument focuses on the design of natural communication systems language evolution and the concept of similarity, similarity and classification, units of analysis and their classification in communication potential fruits of Tinbergen's research design.
Journal ArticleDOI
Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape
Bryan C. Pijanowski,Luis J. Villanueva-Rivera,Sarah L. Dumyahn,Almo Farina,Bernie Krause,Brian M. Napoletano,Stuart H. Gage,Nadia Pieretti +7 more
TL;DR: This article presents a unifying theory of soundscape ecology, which brings the idea of the soundscape—the collection of sounds that emanate from landscapes—into a research and application focus and proposes a research agenda that includes six areas.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer
TL;DR: In this paper, the author takes the second position and extends the study of our associations to nonhumans, and proposes a vocabulary to follow human and nonhuman relations without stopping at artificial divides between what is purely technical and what is social, and builds "its" or "his" own text in such a way that the text itself is a machine that exemplifies several of the points made by the author.