Purr, squawk, chirp - animals speak out at new online archive

Günter Tembrock, a young scientist at the Zoological Institute only wanted to try out a new tape-recorder when he took his microphone to a Berlin garden back in 1951. There he captured the voice of a wild tawny owl as it ‘chatted’ with two caged birds inside his office. That was the start of the Animal Sound Archive, a scientific documentation of animal voices as an expression of their behaviour. Today, the Animal Sound Archive at Humboldt University in Berlin is, with 110,000 samples, one of the oldest and largest collections of animal sounds in the world. It contains 1,800 species of birds, the world’s largest collection of mammal-sounds, 150 species of arthropods, and various fish, amphibian and reptilian species. It even has the only recording ever made of a mole. The unique archive is housed in Berlin, but the recordings have become globe-trotters. Audio-installations in museums and zoological gardens around the world make use of them, and rare animal voices can be heard in the digital edition of Germany’s well-known Brockhaus encyclopaedia. What’s more, the voices of six endangered species can even be downloaded as mobile phone ring tones as part of an unusual environmental protection campaign called ‘Nature is Calling,’ which is sponsored by the German government, writes Deutsche Welle.

Find out what it sounds like
Listen to the more than 11.000 digital recordings of animals here: http://tsa.engelhardt-media.de/content_80_en.html