Of toots and squeeks and cycle brakes, of baby fawns and kents

These two light-hearted posts by Martin Collinson point up the whole problem with this Ivorybill Audio fun. As I mentioned 200 years ago in a long-lost birdforum post, there is very little distinctive spectrographically about the known Ivorybill sounds. They are just a "toot." That ladder-shaped harmonic strucure is one of the simplest in existence, and is created by a gazillion things. All these subtle differences of squeekier, more nasal, more bell-like, more resonant, clarinet versus bicycle horn are very hard or impossible to see in a sonogram; even more so on sounds recorded in the wild, not a sound studio. These are all matters that have to be left to the judgement of human ears and human brains.