(Disclaimer: Searches using various keywords were conducted for this topic, and produced no posts. Truly.)

I dislike pummeled (sp?) rethreads as much as anyone.

Hi there!

The BFRO website has recently posted an audio file of, reportedly, a distant BF scream recorded this year by a family camping in WA, I believe. The vocalization is distant, but the audio is crystal clear with a sudden harmony at the recording's end. Two of them?

Listen to it at your leisure. I love it.

Puyallup, Snohomish, and Del Norte thirty years later.

http://www.bfro.net/REF/bfmedia.asp

And for this reason, I post this topic.

Listen to the popular Australian Yowie recording, the 1994 Ohio Columbiana County recording and the (remastered?) "In Search of..." recording found on the net under the appropriately titled "Geez." Listen to any of them.

I put these howls to music and to my ears, the calls in these recordings howl/sing/scream musically in the same key/chord/note progression.

Really.

I'm no musical theorist, but calls/screams/howls recorded over the span of three decades over many a landmass which happen to match a single chord/melody progression or fall in a certain key are difficult to explain away. Unless you have a conspiracy spanning thirty years, fifty states, a distant island continent, and a couple of virtuso divas whose vocal chords span a generation. Could Ray Wallace sing?

Well, it could be done then. But, how probable?

I am nearly hell-bent that this circumstantial audio evidence of same key vocalizations is just another "key" to unlock the doors for mainstream science to come through and listen to what forums and BF researchers such as are included at this site have to say.

I have mentioned the following elsewhere, but again I'll mention of a saxophone player who recorded an album where he played to the sounds of a wolf species and a whale species. My music instructor played it for me around 1982. (I would say blue whale and gray wolf, but I do forget exactly what whale and what wolf.)

This musician found that these particular creatures' vocalizations were in the key of b flat. They apparently hit only the notes b flat,c, d, e flat, f, g, and a in their vocalizations, whatever the octave, and I'm guessing, no accidental b or e notes vocalized. Make sense?

Cub fans tuning into their favorite station in Chicago at 2 am on a morning in November 2003 can vouch for what is being said. The overnight hosts played a CD which had music accompanied to the BF sounds. The calls sync to the melody or else the melody syncs to the calls. They sing.

Check out any BF recording regarded as genuine and play them simultaneously. Them critters sing in tune!

Thanks for your indulgence!

DR

DarkWabbit
Hey, this is new to me!!
Thanks' for the post.......

[I'm really Elmer Fudd ]

Interesting point of view relating to the howls and music...

Witnesses that recorded those sounds also filed a report that should be posted on the BFRO website soon.

I apologize for the delay.

mel

I sing in Sasquatch refrain?

What prevents someone from taking the recording from 1978 and just playing it on a speaker? Thats a well known area and there ARE people out there that will play a joke. Its so hard today with all the technology plus all the focus over BF back 30 years ago in that area. Its against logic AFTER helens erruption they would come back, and lets say for a chance they did, the mountain could blow anytime and animals know when to get out. I really think its a hoax I would like to think it isnt but its fishy all in the one area where every weekend warrior goes to look for BF. lol

I'm more impressed with sounds or prints in the middle of nowhere where BF's arent reported all the time from a bunch of nuts. For every real possible sighting there are 20-30 fake.

Lt

I'm not finding any new sound recordings on the link you provided.

Try this link, first one at the top of the page.

Mike

Will be going out in the field next week. Will have my tape recorder on 24/7!

I guess we can say, we are not alone in the woods.....

spooky stuff, note to self, keep sound recording device w/ me when in the woods...

I noticed the way the dog reacted

Very interesting recording and the reaction from the dog was interesting too. Cant wait for the BFRO report to come out.

Having camped in the GP for years it makes me wonder if more has been heard but not recorded or passed off as other animals or creatures of the forest.

Things that make you go,,,,,,,,,,,,,hhhhmmmmmmm

very scary. we played it with the headphones on and it gave us chicken skin
gael

My concern is that these folks are hearing a BF Researcher call-blasting in the distance.
I have often wondered about the possibility of this happening....
What can be done to ensure that this doesn't happen ?
Those calls sure do sound like other alleged BF recordings I have heard......that could be a good sign !



Or, NOT.......

I've often wondered this myself...

The recording sounds authentic ,imho. Gifford Pinchot National forest covers a huge area in which Mt St Helens is a part of. They didnt give the exact location . Mt St Helens eruptions since 1980"s really havnt disturbed any wildlife since then. In fact they say wildlife is making a huge comeback on many levels in and through out the area....

Great recording, I had not heard that new one yet (March 2005). I also agree that the only reaonsble explaination could be BF research making the call. Sure doesn't sound like a cougar or a coyote.
Thanks for the link,
Evacuate

Good Lord! That is the same sound I , my Brother, and a friend heard while camping at the remote Tillicum campground SE of Mt St Helens in September of 2003. This camp ground is 5 miles NE of the famouse Skookum meadow. The sound was also a long distance away like these recorded sounds were.
In the summer of 2001 we heard much closer vocals at the same campground at 2AM, loud enough to wake us up, but they were more of a wuuuble wuuuuble wuuuuble tipe of a sound. Almost like a garbled language. You can read that report on BFRO.
I am wondering now if we heard him in 2003. We didn't ponder it to much that night because it was so far away. We just filed it away as a maybe/maybe not. But know I am wondering.

Gotta make another trip there soon. Four times we have used that camp ground as a base camp when doing Bigfoot field work in that area. If what we heard in 2003 was Bigfoot, then we have heard him 2 out of the four times there.

Note: During our 2003 trip we also packed -in to spend one night in the Skookum meadow itself. Three men in a backpack tent built for two, add rain that moved in after midnight, bad breath, elk bugles, images in our heads of a bigfoot hand sliping under the tent like in that 50's movie, and you get some pretty miserable people. We never moved so fast getting back to base camp as soon as it was light.

If you did record another researcher call blasting, and you happened to also have that call on your harddrive, it would only take a minute to show it was the same. Put both calls into the necessary program and do a Cross Correlation Analysis on them. When it comes up 1.0, you'll know they are the same.

Even if the pitch were altered, a 2D CCA would detect the same call.

That is the least of our worries..

The musical voice of the supposed BF calls interests me too. I think there is something in there to research, but I can't say any more about it now.

It's at the end of the track. The last call where it sounds like two in unison. Interesting.

Then why say anything at all?

Does that mean you.. want me to say more? Well alright..

Using the program SoundRuler (available for free at http://soundruler.sourceforge.net/index.html) one can start to build up a library of suspected BF calls and look for things that might help to identify the calls you are interested in, and exclude other calls.

Here is a graphic of a suspected BF call:

That's the one with the moaning animal and the barking dog.

There are a couple of things to say about it. First, it's not a great recording. The signal is almost lost to the noise, but not quite.

Second, though it is hard to see in the jpeg here, the call has an interesting feature (but let's emphasize the tentative nature of this: IF that feature is really there) of having more than one fundamental note in it.

Most animal calls are far more simple than that. I've looked at some, saw-whet-owl, barred owl, coyote, dog, but I'm still way behind the learning curve here and there are more to look through.. but the upshot of it is, for what you'd expect to find howling out there, there isn't anything that I could find that has this feature.

Dogs, coyotes, owls, have very simple calls in this regard. There is a main harmonic and the other harmonics fall where they should.

But this call *is*, maybe, as the original poster said, sort of harmonizing with himself.

Humans can do this, or something like it, such as in Mongolian Tuva singing.

Somehow I don't think this was a wailing monk out in the forest practicing his Tuva style.. and anyway, a human singing this way could never be loud enough to produce this recording.

Now here's a human attempting to mimic a BF call.

It probably isn't obvious, but the suspect call has two "main frequencies", around 500Hz and 850Hz.

A harmonic is always a multiple of the fundamental. If the first number were the fundamental, you'd expect the harmonic to fall at 1000Hz.

Now the recording is very bad, and who knows how many generations it has gone through. Possibly the 500 is closer to 450 and the 850 is closer to 900, in which case we have nothing here. But as I said, this is very interesting to me. I hope I can get some field recordings to test this idea. I'm glad to see that someone else has independantly come across the same thing.

I think it is a valid concern. For one thing, how many people have those recordings on their hard drive to compare? What if they didn’t have the opportunity to record the sounds they heard?
Remember not everyone out in the woods is a researcher or has the necessary resources to do what you suggest.

Let’s use the BFRO for an example; Joe Schmoe reports hearing sounds in Bigfoot Springs, Arkansas but has no recording of it.
A BFRO investigator calls Joe on the phone (or meets him in person), listens to the guy’s story, gets a description of the sound, the reported sounds match what has been described many times in the past, finds him and his story credible, checks other BFRO and unaffiliated researchers known in the area and finds out that there was no one blasting sounds in the general area. The BFRO investigator publishes a Class B report and all is good.

How can anyone be sure that someone hadn’t recorded a sound off the internet or otherwise obtained it, wasn’t affiliated with an organization or is otherwise known as a researcher and was out there call blasting? In the meantime this gets published on the BFRO website as a good report, but there is no way to know for sure. This area might now be considered an area of activity. Now there is the potential for many people wasting their time in an area with no activity when a respected organization reported that there were potential events.

I don’t think it’s the least of our worries. It wouldn’t be anyone’s fault but that is a very plausible scenario. Thinking too tight in the box doesn’t help; in fact it makes one look a little elitist.

I'm not really elitist, I just sound that way.

No, it isn't a true worry because the problem has a solution. If it happens, it will be discovered. That isn't to say that Joe Schmoe won't be all excited about his BF call that turns out to really be Jack Slack over the mountainside callblasting.

You're pretty sure about that, huh? How?

If it happens? What makes you think it hasn't already?

Right, perhaps it has. What I am saying is, if it does happen, it will be discovered.

I can tell you that the four suspected BF calls I have collected do not appear to be the same call when measured against one another.

So it wouldn't be a problem, you see? Someone might temporarily believe they had a unique call, but when it came time to collect and analyze calls in a study, this would be discovered.

So, there is a temporary harm to the fellow who collects the bogus call, but the harm is not lasting.

To continue, I have another program, AutoTune, which was created to detect the pitch in human voices. Human voices are pretty complex, and AT sometimes has trouble with very nasally voices, and with things like the Tuva chanting. It also has a lot of trouble detecting pitch on the four suspected BF calls I have.

I believe this is because the calls have this "double fundamental" quality to them. AT doesn't know what to do with that.

So, I have high hopes of finding something useful if I can ever get a good field recording.

I guess you missed my point.

Well that's always possible. I get tunnel vision, and I was working on putting this thing up. Can you help me understand it?

Regarding the problem of BF researchers calling or blasting,

In response to Saskwatcher et al:

Truly respectfully, and hopefully a heartening opinion...

To be sure, yes, everything is usually possible. We have probes on Mars.

I have no audiographs to back this up. But, what you hear is no call-blasting recording in conjunction with the event. It could be an elaborate audio concoction of voices, a dog, and a wonderful little child sleeping who sounds as if (s)he has some congestion in the chest all mixed in a studio. A very do-able possibility, truly.

But, if on face value, if this is a recording made by a camping family, the sound is not a blaster.

Of course, I am not adjudicating as to what it is. I am saying that if the scenario is in fact a family recording sounds in a tent in the wilderness, what they are recording is no recording. Talk about signal to noise ratio. A prerecorded blast would not have such clarity. None of the recordings of BF that I have heard could be played back as clear. Perhaps, I missed one.

Remember, generations of analog recordings, especially those made on tape, degrade exponentially with the noise of the machine playbacks and recordings. Even if the purported call blasting was on CD, the associated .wav file would still carry the same audio artifacts (noise) of the original recording.

None of that here.

Just to be very clear, if the scenario, a family camping recording weird sounds on a video camera in their tent is truthful, whatever it was calling was really there.

The sounds were not those of BF researchers blasting. The audio artifacts, volume, decay, reverb, chorus, equalization, etc, treble, bass, mid-range attenuation inherent from a PA unit and its speakers used to project the sound are not present.

What you hear is live.

Thanks for your indulgence reading this thread.

DR

Well I HAVE 2 theories.

I am not saying its fake. by no means I find the people who recorded it to be sound.

Here is what I have either someone is using that call as call blasting, or someone else is playing a joke. My reasons for EVEN thinking this, is that this place is WELL KNOWN to be a former BF area and everyone and their dog will be out their looking, if anywhere would be the best place for a hoax would be near helens park.

Ok now assuming this is true, I have theory. 1978 was a solid recording of THIS type of sound, this was 2 years before the explosion for Helens.

Ok now we are at 2005 and now the sound is heard again and Helens could blow at anytime. Could it be that the BF know something is worng and are scared or talking? Like wild animals behaving funny before an earhquake?

Just 2 theories. 1 its callblasted/ hoax or 2 its real and related possibly to Helens activity?

Lt1956

lt1956, there very well could be some connection as you suggest, between the things going on with St. Helen's and just the same there may very well not be. I'm no one to be able to back either side of those arguments the way some other folks here might be able to.

On the other hand, you bring up an interesting thought....requiring the putting aside of it being call-blasting...what if it were a things are normal type of call? Kind of a reassurance call? I know I'm not explaining this well so bear with me.

1978...things are great around St.Helens and stay that way for the next couple years. Then the BOOM!! and things are relatively quiet. Fast forward to 2005 and we have a few months of renenewed rumbling and grumbling.

This March recording shows up, about the time that they decide things have calmed down enough with St.Helens to reopen basically everything with the exception of the climbing routes (dammit)...what if its kind of a sassie welcome wagon as they move back in?

Yep, complete pure speculation, and theory and all feel free to take shots at it, for that's all it is. Just a thought.....and as most of you know they are so far and few between with me I thought I'd better share it before it got away

Here's the "harmony" part of the new recording from GP:

We analyzed similar data with an array of SAs and produced different results. What kind of equipment are you using? ie, in addition to the software program mentioned??

I tried to upload a better sonogram picture, but I can't get a screen capture from my other program, SoundForge 7.

Anyway, the thing to notice about the last picture I put up is the wide spread in the Amplitude/Frequency spectrum. There is a lot of sound in there jammed up close together. The main frequencies appear to be around 250 & 850 Hz. That would be like playing a B and a G# together on your piano. One is not the harmonic of the other, which means the generator of this sound created two individual tones.

As I said before, humans can do this, but not at that volume.

Here's one from earlier in the recording (last one I'm putting up):

This one, though it isn't so easy to perceive it with the ears, has the same quality as the obvious multitonal scream at the end. Here the main frequencies seem to be 140 and 850 Hz. That's a D and a G# together.

The question now is, is this really a feature of suspected BF calls? Better recordings would make that more clear. And if it is a real feature, what other known animals can generate this kind of call?

I just want to point out that the website I got some of the calls from identified the "Ohio Field Recording" as a dog howl, but the dog howl sample they put up for comparison was NOT multitonal. The dominant frequencies are similar, but the suspected call has some extra frequencies the dog howl doesn't have.

So, if this is a real feature of suspected BF recordings, you can see how it can be used to distinguish susp. BF calls from, say, dog howls. But more investigation needs to be done before I can say this is ready for primetime.

Very interesting work. I have a couple observations to throw in there, being a singer/musician/sound tech.

"If" these fundamentals are near the 500 hz region, then I'm having trouble believing a large, heavy animal are making it. With middle "c" being 'around' 262 hz, you'd have to go to the next "a" up from middle C to get to 440 hz, and one octave over middle C would be roughly 512 hz. So, yes, somewhere around a B flat or natural B would be 500hz. Being 6 ft and 200#, I sing tenor. I'm just having trouble mentally 'seeing' a creature much larger than me, belting out tones yet another octave up out of MY comfort range. Not-withstanding...

In the mid-80's I was working as a church camp night security guy when we heard a sound I'll never forget. Around midnight, as 3 of us stood under a security light talking amoung ourselves... the night was shattered by what can only be desribed this way: It started out sounding like a child screaming at the top of it's lungs then dropped in pitch and filled in to sound like a woman screaming... continued to drop down in register until it finally sounded like it moved into a man's vocal range then ended up in a low baritone/bass range, yet as it hit that range, instantly became multi-timbral... like several voices 'moaning' as it sloughed off and ended. There was never a break in the tone(s) and the whole episode lasted maybe 6 to 8? seconds as it started HIGH and finished LOW with that multi-tonal moan. We jumped in a car, drove over to the teen dorm 1/4 mile across the grounds since that was the direction we heard it come from. Sure enough, many of them were standing outside the dorm in little groups. When we got out and started asking what was going on, they were standing there in complete silence and began pointing to the next field west of their dorm where it was an old excavation site maybe a quarry at one point, with a 'junk yard feel' to it with old abandoned vehicles and farm equipment... woods and such. After making sure we weren't being pranked (everyone was accounted for)... and hearing their descripton and seeing how many of them were very upset and disturbed by the incident, we eventually called the local police who responded.

The next day, county police and ISP even flew over the area in a chopper to see if there might be 'someone' laying out there injured somewhere. Nothing was ever found or heard the rest of camp, and we felt foolish for calling the police over it, but the whole thing shook up a lot of the campers on that side of the camp. When it happened, it even sent a chill down our spines hearing it so clearly.. and we were well over 1/4 mile away from the dorm (to the east), and this sound came a little ways further west of the teen dorm. When the 3 of us heard it, we all just froze... looked at each other with raised eyebrows and generally reacted to it with that classic .... "what the......?"

At the time, I NEVER thought BF... now all these years later, reading others encounters and vocalizations that are out there... I can't find any other logical or reasonable explanation for it. That multi-timbral moan at the end... you just don't forget hearing something like that.

I said fundamental a couple of times when I should have said dominant frequency. In humans the dominant frequency is usually the harmonic above the fundamental. So for these dominant frequencies, the fundamentals should be half the value.

But you can't really pick out those in most of these recordings because they aren't good enough. While the low notes do travel, they get lost in the other noise in the recording.

And another thing to consider is how our vocal tract shapes the sounds we can make. A very large creature would not necessarily make a lower tone -- think of an elephant's trumpet, for instance. If a BF has the capability, it surely could make tones much lower than we can, but it may not have the same vocal tract structure. It could have extra resonating chambers in its vocal apparatus, for instance, which generate louder overtones than we can create. I'm looking at, for instance, how each of the three snippets I posted here have the frequency 850Hz in common. What if this tone arises from some kind of resonating structure in the vocal tract of the animals? It is then present as a kind of drone note, like a banjo, against which the other tone rises and falls..

Juat a thought that, again, needs more looking into.

Good stuff dbdonlon, thanks for the posts.....

Report is now posted for the recording.

Here's the link.

GREAT Investigative Work, DBDonlon !

I think you've found your 'niche' in BF Research !

Have you eliminated any purported BF sounds using this technique ?

Try recording (vid-cam audio) someone imitating BF Howl for comparison.....
appropriate distance, howling through a mega-phone, etc.....
and then compare with whatcha got.

Absolutley! Seriously good work DBDonlon.

Wow!

You DEFINATELY found your niche in BF research!

WELL DONE!

On the BFRO site:



Now why would they do that?

I downloaded the file, and I agree, that being is singing for pleasure

Thank you for your kind words, folks! I appreciate them.

As an update, I took SoundRuler down to my studio machine to do some cross correlation analyses of some of these. They can take some time even on a 2.4G P4 laptop. They were only a little faster on my studio AMD 64..

But the results were interesting. In one test, which included two human attempts to mimick BF calls, all of the calls came back fairly similar. What interested me, though, was that three of the BF calls were more similar to each other than even the two human calls relative to one another.

This was the amplitude power test. I did the test using the "normalize" function, which makes each call the same overall volume level, and then tests for similarity in the power of the calls. Two of the calls were the moaning variety and one was a scream, so that all three would come out so close together was something I didn't expect.

But I have a lot of learning to do about this stuff..

Thank's again dbdonlon..
Awesome work and it's been really cool reading about your findings....

http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Bima/doppler.html

http://www.vectorsite.net/tpecp9.html

A funny thing about alleged bigfoot sounds. Several people take into account the hertz and pitch run on software available to them on thier PC or the internet, without actually studying a lot of the aspects involved with making such a comparrison. ( Easy enough to do. Look it up and read for a few hours.) what they fail to take into account is the doppler effect. Hertz and pitch both incease and decrease depending on motion of the object in question and distance.

Most comparrisons are done using a stationary human in an attempt to recreate the effect of the sound. The human while utilizing various vocals,is stationary. The recordings made from a fixed point.

The other problem is that no one really knows the exact distance of the "vocal" in question. Most times its guessed at or alluded to with the maker never actually seen. Without that data for input most comparrisons to me ,would seem moot and nothing better than anyones best investigation of the circumstances related to the reported or recorded sound.

Without the actual distance, there are to many flaws in knowing wether the sound in question is approaching, stationary or receding.And without taking that info into account,both the pitch and the hertz from digitizing it for camparrison are not accurate. IMO.