Animal Sound Library Free Download LINK
Lope Salapan
The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the world's largest and oldest archive of animal sounds. And now that the entire collection has been digitized, it is also the most accessible.
The digital archive consists of nearly 150,000 audio recordings, covering about 9,000 species of animals. Although there is an emphasis on birds, species from across the animal kingdom are represented. Over the last decade, the Library has also expanded its mission to include video recordings of animal behavior.
According to library director Mike Webster, digitizing the archive is part of the Library's goal to be "as useful as possible for the broadest audience possible.\" At the Library's website, anyone can search or browse the archive, as well as learn how to collect and upload their own recordings to continue to build the collection.
In addition to collecting and preserving natural history recordings, the Macaulay Library actively promotes the use of its recordings for a variety of purposes, including scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts. For teachers, the Lab of Ornithology's Education department has developed lessons for elementary, middle, and high school students based around the archive. Moviemakers have used the archive to depict natural sounds accurately and as inspiration for new sound effects. For bird watchers and other nature lovers, Macaulay Library staff have produced audio field guides with recordings of particular species or geographic locations.
The Sound Library is supported by the Acoustic Atlas through a collaborative project with the Montana State University Library, which collects and curates field recordings of natural sounds in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
The Museum für Naturkunde is home to one of the largest collections of animal sound recordings in the world. They're studied by scientists to learn about what animals live in an area, and what time(s) of year they're active, and in what abundance.
Fonoteca Zoológica is the animal sound library of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales of Madrid (Spain). Our library provides support to research on animal sounds and acts as a depository of animal recordings for scientific research.
The list below, of mammal audio files organised by ecozone, is a work in progress. Please let me know if you know of other call libraries I can link to, or have sound files of your own that we can share here.
The British Library of Wildlife Sounds holds more than 240,000 scientifically organised and documented field recordings covering all classes of sound-producing animals from every zoogeographical region. More than 10,000 species of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects are represented, including many rare and threatened species. Most British and European species are covered.
The East Africa Primate Diversity Program has a call library covering many species of Galago and another covering most of the Hyraxes. These calls can be instrumental in helping to identify similar looking species. In any case, hyrax calls are just plain entertaining.There are other calls here too, including African Palm Civet, and the library is growing.
CSIRO (the scientifc arm of the Australian Government) maintains a wildlife sound archive. Primarily birds, it also includes mammals from Australia, New Guinea and beyond. In late 2017 the archive was being turned into a digital database and was gradually being made available online through the Atlas of Living Australia.
Several CDs on a German website feature mammals, and though the site is in German it seems some of these are in several language similtaneously (and all include latin names).
This double CD has an impressively broad range of mammal sounds.
A deer call CD covers 24 species;
All the bears are covered in this one;
This CD covers many of the larger canids.
The sounds were partly recorded with animals trained for media production, partly recorded in zoos and wildlife centers. The asset list includes but is not limited to: amur leopards, bottlenose dolphins, californian sealions, pacific walruses, red ruffed lemurs, owls, parrots, dwarf little fruit bats, hamsters, guinea pigs and many more.
The content has been recorded at 192KHz with a Sanken CO100K plus a Sennheiser 8050 for center image and a couple of Sennheiser MKH8040 for stereo image.
A special section of the library features samples recorded at 384KHz. For these sounds an additional microphone was employed, specifically the CMPA by Avisoft-Bioacoustics which records up to 200 KHz. This microphone was actually used to record most of the library but the 384KHz format was preserved only where energy was found beyond 96KHz not to occupy unnecessary disk space.
All files are delivered as stereo bounce of these for mics, though in some instances an additional couple of CO100K was added to the sides.
The resulting ultrasonic spectrum is rich and allows for truly extreme manipulation of the content.
Animal Hyperrealism Vol I & II are two of the best libraries that have come out period. Prior to these libraries there has been a void of cleanly recorded animals for a long time, and next to no high sample rate recorded animals at all.
With A Sound Effect, Asbjoern has created a web site where our international community can browse, learn, and share the vast fruits of our labors. Together we are accelerating the very real potential power of sound design as a recognized art form.
A Sound Effect is a great hub, and is one of the first places I visit to look for sounds by category or genre. I started coming here to see if I could find libraries that I knew I had heard, but forgot WHERE I had heard them.
Each sound file in this library is embedded with rich, detailed metadata to help you find the exact sound effect you need with descriptions that that go beyond the literal to detail the emotional power of these unique recordings.
We also had the opportunity to consult for a movie called The New World by Terrence Malick, that was taking place in a 17th century English colony in Virginia called Jamestown. It was very important for them to have accurate nature sounds that would have been heard at that time in history. We had to do historic research in order to determine what animal species were originally living there and make sure that they were not actually introduced there at a later time.
You ran an animal recording workshop at Universidad Nacional in Bogotá on bioacoustics. What tricks and tips did you describe in your workshops and what did you find the students have the most issues with when recording birds (and other animals)?
Once I even had to foley the sound of a tapir for the entire documentary. I found locations that looked similar in the picture and recorded footsteps on grass and water splashes from a lake that I later added in post. It makes a big difference to have sounds recorded outdoors vs. indoor studio recordings.
You work as a consultant with Macaulay Library. Could you describe the process of how you help people source sounds for their projects as well as how people can effectively use the library for their own productions?
I have a good idea how much I can use DSP to reduce noise in the recordings. There are certain types of noise that are difficult to remove or minimize without affecting the primary quality of the recording. Over-processing a recording is not ideal, so getting a clean version of the sound at the start is crucial.
Remember that Designing Sound is a site run by the community for the community, and we always welcome guest posts. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, please contact shaun at designingsound dot org.
The BBC Nature Sounds Archive is a comprehensive collection of animal noises and nature recordings that is unrivalled in the world of sound. This comprehensive and unique archive was compiled over the last few decades by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Since the 1960s, BBC sound recordists travelling on documentary and research assignments haven been collecting sound recordings from all over the world.
The BBC Nature Sounds Archive contains more than 13,600 noises and sounds, including a unique collection of more than 7,000 recordings of bird calls. All recordings were labelled and documented with the help of ornithologists and scientists who analysed the sounds and identified the animals and birds.
For many years the BBC has been producing impressive, award-winning animal and nature documentaries. The BBC crews often travel to the farthest corners of the world, e.g. to capture footage of whales in the Arctic Circle. The wealth of sound material recorded on those travels was later analysed and labelled by biologists and experts, resulting in a unique archive filled with animal noises.
Very few sound files in the BBC archives are under 30 seconds in length. Unlike the tracks in most modern archives, the BBC files run between 2 and 4 minutes. This is very generous and also incredibly helpful because many tracks contain variations throughout their duration. Sound editors looking for alternative takes will find this very useful. However, there are also very extensive sounds. If you like, you could listen to the big prairie chicken for over 30 minutes!
Ever since the BBC began to send its famous documentary film crews into the world in the 1960s, sound recordists have been capturing a wealth of unique sounds that are almost impossible to get. With the BBC Nature Sounds Archive you will travel around the world and to the farthest reaches of the planet. Feel like observing birds of paradise in Papua New Guinea? Or listening to orang-utans in Indonesia? Or what about crawling through the rain forest of Venezuela and running into a giant otter that is about to eat a tasty piranha fish?
The BBC Nature Sound Archive contains a comprehensive collection of animal calls. Years of work went into creating these recordings as well as documenting them in extraordinary detail. Animals are categorised according to their name (including their Latin/scientific description) and the location of the recording, which makes it easy to find a specific animal. Howl with the Canis Latrans, growl like a Canis Lupus or transform into a Felis Catus.
9738318194