Would you like to hear an indri, a common loon, a walrus underwater? Courtesy of the nice, probably very sound-obsessed people at the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, you can now hear all of those sounds. And you don’t have to travel to Madagascar, Canada, the Arctic, or even Cornell to do it, either. You can do it right now, because the library has digitized more than 80 years of sound recordings in one handy place.
This is the largest and oldest collection of its kind in the world, and it took researchers about 15 years to accomplish the monumental task of putting together over 150,000 recordings of over 9,000 species of animals. There are a lot of birds — it is an ornithology lab, after all, and one of the reasons for this project was to help people who research birds practice their identification skills. But there are lots of other animals too. Almost 8,000 hours of animal-listening pleasure are just sitting there on their server. And just think: All these animals can now aid you in procrastination.
So far we like the cougars, the anteaters, and the hippos, who kind of sound like a door opening, and then sound mad.
