The exhibit is a technological feast for eyes and ears, displaying sounds, pictures and natural history relating to a wide range of whales and dolphins as well as the environmental and man-made sounds that fill our seas.
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I can say that our entire team (staff) has seen a marked difference not only in the amount of time that people spend in the exhibition but also in the number of people entering the exhibition area in the first place. Visitors are drawn to the sounds coming from the Raven computers and enter the exhibition room to find out more. They also love the interactive experience that they have with Raven. We as staff love that people are coming away from the exhibit asking questions and interested in learning more about the local environment and species that live here.

Alice E. M. Pope
Scottish Conservation Officer
WDCS Wildlife Centre, Spey Bay, Moray, Scotland

IT'S IN!!! And allow me to express my joy with the exhibit. Several staff have had the opportunity to mess with it and we find it very enjoyable. Surely it will be one of the more visited exhibits of the Museum, one I look forward to watching patrons use and admire. I am sure you have both considered ways to integrate the program into school curriculums, but if you have not gone too far in that direction I would love to explore it with you both. My brain is racing with ideas. Sound production and reception is very much like a new dimension and this program allows you to manipulate that in very fun ways. Students could really step into new perspectives with it...and new appreciations of the natural world.

With much gratitude,
Toby

Toby Stephenson
Bar Harbor Whale Museum
College of the Atlantic

There’s simply nothing else of this quality offered anywhere else. The installation was effortless. The sounds of birds and other animals emanating from the Raven exhibit pull people in—when senses other than sight are engaged, visitors stay longer and enjoy it more.

Eric Filo, Exhibits Manager
The Wild Center / Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks

Personally, I can’t imagine a world without sonagrams, as I can’t imagine listening without also seeing. I have combined the listening and seeing throughout this book, and I hope that you will continue this practice on your own. Take a CD of bird sounds off your shelf and play it into your computer, now seeing the songs come to life, appreciating the details and the differences among them. Make your own recordings, bringing them home to gorge yourself on the details of how a robin or thrush or warbler sings. Or try the ultimate in techie birding – get the appropriate software program (see below), a laptop computer, and a microphone, and you can watch the songs dance across your computer monitor in the great out-of-doors as you listen to birds there. Listen as you see, and you will hear a different world singing to you.

The software from Cornell University is called “Raven.” This marvelous program runs on both Macs and PCs and was designed by researchers who have spent decades devising new ways to record and analyze animal sounds for their work. I love this advanced program that is designed for professional use by researchers, and I used it to produce all of the sonagrams in this book. Even better news, however, is that most readers of this book will be thoroughly happy with the simplified and far less expensive version of Raven that is now available.

Donald Kroodsma, Professor Emeritus
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

We chose Raven for this course because it has the breadth useful for any sound analysis, without the specialization which is typical of many sound programs. This is probably partially true because the Cornell designers, from Canary and through Raven, have worked closely with teachers and students who use Raven for both teaching and research.

Raven provides the best students with research level complexity and also is useable by the less motivated students. This makes a course, such as this one, popular as a useful and fun introduction to the methods of quantitative science, without having the boring features of traditional experimental science courses. The Raven Team has been most helpful in solving the problems that always occur with large groups of students, some of whom have not progressed beyond using their computers as word processors, or for Internet surfing. In conclusion, Raven has proved to be an excellent choice for this course.

David R. Bach, Professor
California State University, Northridge

I've been using Raven for my Physics of Sound class for several years now and the thing I like most about it is it's simple and straight-forward look and ease of use backed-up with real computational power and functionality. Among other things, I use it for teaching about sound waveforms and spectra, filtering, the overtone series, analysis of musical instrument sounds, voice recognition technology, sound spectroscopy, and as a sound player. I really like how I can record and have a real-time waveform and spectrogram presented so my students can see the data unfold as they hear the sound. The interface is very simple to use and most of the GUI area is reserved for data display; this works very well when presented in the classroom. I also use Raven graphical output to make handouts, exam questions, and lecture graphics.

Luke Keller, Assistant Professor
Ithaca College

Raven Lite is an excellent tool for college students who are new to sound
analysis. We use it extensively in our general science course "Physics 1240,
Sound and Music."

John C. Price, Professor
University of Colorado at Boulder

The Raven Video software allowed us to take video recordings from a hand held Sony Camcorder and do sound and image analysis quickly and accurately. Some years ago, we had to record split-screen images in order to capture and synchronize the video and audio of animal behaviors. Raven Video software allowed Image and sound data to be easily manipulated, analyzed and transported to presentation documents. Although we did not use all of the features available for video and sound analysis, there are many available. This software was part of a seamless process from digital video recordings, to digitized video movies, to synchronized images and sounds and finally to presentation documents. We were pleased with the easy of use of this software and it worked wonderfully for determining the reaction times of spiders to the hot chemical defense of bombardier beetles.

Daniel J. Aneshansley, Professor of Biological and Environmental Engineering,
and Thomas Eisner, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology
Cornell University

We use Raven Lite in our physics classes, to study the characteristics of bird song. Students get a much richer understanding of wave properties like amplitude and frequency when they can see and hear it in a 3D graph!

Matthew Anthes-Washburn, High School Physics Teacher
Parkway Academy of Technology and Health, Boston

The species that I recorded was the Red-winged-Blackbird. I was surprised that there was so many and after I recognized the sound it makes, I was able to identify it every time it sang.

High School Student
Parkway Academy of Technology and Health, Boston

I just want to say that I love Raven. I've used it on our Citizen Science weekends, and Donald Kroodsma's book gave me insight into its potential.

As a young person, I used to look at the sonograms in the Golden Guide to Birds, and wonder what I could learn from them. Raven has made it possible for me to find out!

Maureen McConnell, Exhibit Developer
Museum of Science, Boston

(T)his exhibit afforded and produced more positive visitor experience than any other interpretive device at CLO-VC. Comparing it to the criteria in Judging Exhibitions (Serrell 2006), the Sound Studio showed evidence of many aspects of excellence from a visitor-centered perspective.
...
Also of note is the fact that the average time spent by visitors engaged in the Sound Studio was 12 minutes. This was a record amount of time at one exhibit according to Serrell (1998) and compared to a study done at the Exploratorium called "Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement" where the longest average holding time for an exhibit was 8 minutes.
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Time spent in the Sound Studio ranged from 1 to 61 minutes, with the average time being 12 minutes (n = 56).
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There was an abundance of evidence in visitor behaviors in the Sound Studio of active and prolonged engagement.
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If audience development in the future is wildly successful, there will probably have to be a sign-up sheet for 20-minute blocks of time by reservation in the Sound Studio.

Serrell & Associates
Museum Exhibition Consultants