Hi everyone! I'm finally back in Halifax after 3.5 months of fieldwork. I'll post about my recent field season with The Dominica Sperm Whale Project in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I thought it would be nice to do a quick write up on what an average day in the lab looks like for me.
If you've had a chance to look at the "Research" tab of this site, you know that my work primarily focuses on sperm whale social communication. More specifically, one of my thesis chapters investigates if sperm whale clan dialects change over time in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean and Eastern Caribbean Sea. When I first started my degree, I thought this would be a fairly easy question to answer, given that our Pacific dataset includes almost 17,000 sperm whale codas! But when I broke that dataset down by location (ex. Galápagos Islands) and clan (ex. Short clan), I found that several years had really small coda sample sizes. To that effect, my current goal at present is to increase coda sample sizes within certain years. All of the early recordings from the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean were made on reel-to-reel tapes using a Nagra recorder. We still have the original tapes and the Nagra, so I spend most of my time these days digitizing tapes, listening to the new audio files, and marking and extracting codas.
The actual process for digitizing was pretty challenging to figure out and involved a lot of research and trial and error. Luckily, our tapes are in great shape and the Nagra is a top-of-the-line recorder. Now that I have the basic protocol down, I've been continuously cranking out newly digitized tapes. My goal is to not only digitize the tapes I need for my research, but also the rest of the tapes in our archive. The video below is from the first day I was successfully able to digitize a tape. It gives you a better idea of the steps involved in converting a reel-to-reel tape to an audio file.
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