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Hello daring Freesounders!!

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring has just arrived.
There are many things that one can associate with Spring, and one of them is birds.

For this double dare I challenge you to record bird sounds and/or to transform them.

RULES:
- You can participate by recording birds, transforming bird sounds or both.
- Bird recordings to be uploaded to Freesound in the normal way (include attribution in the description and sound sources). Geotaggings are optional but encouraged. Also encouraged date information, weather information and type of spot (e.g.. forest, garden city,...). Post a link on the thread to your sound(s).
- If you chose to transform bird recordings, you must give proper attribution. If you create a non-musical transformed sound, please upload to Freesound in the normal way (include attribution in the description and sound sources). Musical pieces should not be uploaded to Freesound. Upload to Soundcloud, CCMixter, Bandcamp, Alonetone, or any other such platform. Make sure to give attribution and to post on this thread with a link to your submission.
- Please tag your uploadrd sounds woth "Dare2025-05".
- There is no lenght limit on bird recordings (other than the technical limits of Freesound, 1Gb maximum size). Transformed sounds / music pieces maximum 3min lenght, please.
- YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED to use bird recordings which are not your own OR from Freesound (e.g. sample packs, 'from the internet', etc)
- If you use one of your recordings for a transformed entry, you must also upload to Freesound the original recording. Give attribution in the same way as you would if using someonelse's sounds.
- ANYTHING NOT SPECIFICALLY FORBIDDEN BY THE RULES IS ALLOWED.
- ANYTHING NOT SPECIFICALLY REQUIRED BY THE RULES IS NOT MANDATORY.

DEADLINE for submissions: 12-Apr-2025.

(P.S. - Have a good idea for a dare? Send me a PM!)

Here is my contribution

org;
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/795868/

processed:
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/795877/

ps do not forget the TAG dare2025-05 in the rules @Allienxxx

klankbeeld wrote:
ps do not forget the TAG dare2025-05 in the rules @Allienxxx

Thanks! Done!

klankbeeld wrote:
Here is my contribution

org;
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/795868/

processed:
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/795877/

Sounds like wind through cavernous tunnels…
Nice sound and very different from the original.
Worth mentioning Paulstretch is a free piece of software and a great tool for sound design.

remember to stick to 3min max length for processed versions, please 😇

ps do not forget the TAG dare2025-05 in the rules @Allienxxx

Fresh recordings from last night:

https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796806/
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796807/
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796808/

Noticeable denoising artifacts in the first as it required a double pass because of traffic.

copyc4t wrote:
Fresh recordings from last night:

https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796806/
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796807/
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796808/

Noticeable denoising artifacts in the first as it required a double pass because of traffic.

I am not an expert in birds, but a bird singing at night is possibly a nightingale.
On one of the recordings there is also a dove or a pigeon.

AlienXXX wrote:

copyc4t wrote:
Fresh recordings from last night:

https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796806/
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796807/
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/796808/

Noticeable denoising artifacts in the first as it required a double pass because of traffic.

I am not an expert in birds, but a bird singing at night is possibly a nightingale.
On one of the recordings there is also a dove or a pigeon.

This somewhat garbled high-pitched song belongs to the European Robin, In the morning it is one of the earliest singers and in the evening it stops being one of the last. It even manages to sing during the night, in the full moon or under a street lamp.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=european%20robin&title=Special%3AMediaSearch&type=image

Hi friends !

I had lot of fun using my file https://freesound.org/people/kevp888/sounds/689898/, from about 21:00 to 23:27 !
I slowed down this nice dawn chorus 4 times, then added a couple of dBs and a slight noise removal... Voila ! Here is the wonderful sound of a Jurassic world, or a spooky alien planet atmosphere, full of strange creatures !
Hope you’ll enjoy !
https://freesound.org/people/kevp888/sounds/797756/

Cheers !

Kevin

Hello Kevin

Indeed! Slowing down bird songs is amasing.
Bird brains operate on a different speed to ours when it comes to music/communication.

Each thrilling tweet might contain a song of its own when slowed down.

if I get the time to make my own entry, this is possibly what I will be looking at doing 🙂

Thanks AlienXXX !
First, I wasn’t so inspired, then the idea came yesterday evening, and the original recording was just fine !
Amazing to hear how the seagulls became such wonderful dinosaurs !

Very curious to hear your contribution !

Cheers !

Kevin

The titles of the sounds say it all.

"Which bird_Im ashamed"
https://freesound.org/people/gis_sweden/sounds/798264/

"Transformed bird"
https://freesound.org/people/gis_sweden/sounds/798268/

And look at that!? - the deadline is upon us!

I am going to try and work on my entry today. I had some ideas, but lack the time to execute

Hopefully this dare has made you think a little bit more about bird sounds. There is a lot of hidden beauty and intricacy if you play them at low speed. There is also huge potential there as raw material for sound design. - Potentially something to further explore in future dares. But not for a while. Of course, for the next dare, we should move into something completely different...

Trying to upload a few things, I somehow had in my head the deadline was the 14th D:
I kind of struggled with this one, getting a clean bird recording is hard in a urbain area.
I hope to modify one too!

A few contributions :
Main one - Mixed 3 bird recordings with processing https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798326/

Field recording at a birdy area : https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798329/
Modified a bird recording https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798325/
A bird recording https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798307/

Sadiquecat wrote:
A few contributions :
Main one - Mixed 3 bird recordings with processing https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798326/

Field recording at a birdy area : https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798329/
Modified a bird recording https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798325/
A bird recording https://freesound.org/people/Sadiquecat/sounds/798307/

I really like the transformed versions - These sounds would sit at ease as FX in games!

So, here is my entry. The link is to a pack that includes both original and transformed recordings.
The seagulls recording does have noise reduction applied.
https://freesound.org/people/AlienXXX/packs/43250/

For me, personally, there were a number of challenges and findings as a result of this dare.
As far as I remember, I had not setup to intentionally record birds in my garden. - My attempts, frustrated by the constant aircraft noise from Heathrow airport, were a reminder of why I upload so few recordings actually made in my garden.
If you live here and get used to it, you don't notice how frequent and intrusive the aircraft noise is. If I am trying to record some props, I got used to just recording my noises in between the aircraft.
But birds are different, Firstly, they are much further away and fainter than sounds that I make with the specific purpose of recording them. Ambient noise becomes much more of a problem.
Also, I cannot control when they start or stop, and a typical bird song is much longer than the low noise gap between aircraft take-offs.

Although starlings are relatively frequent visitors to the trees and TV antennae nearby, none decided to show up during my recording sessions. That is a shame because starlings, although they do not have a particularly beautiful repertoire of songs, they do make a lot of interesting sounds including series of clicks and some strange noises.

One of my recordings was accidentally made with the recorder set to mp3. Applying noise-reduction afterwards reduced the background aircraft and traffic noise, but created this horrible high-frequency constant buzzing artifact.

In a happier incident, I discovered that sparrow tweets slowed down to 75% speed sound like parakeets.

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THIS DARE IS NOW CLOSED
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Feel free to continue discussing here relevant topics. But no more entries, please.