The Old Mission Creek Frog Choir Collaboration

The Old Mission Creek Frog Choir is well known for its boisterous nightly shows. I am approaching them to propose some collaborative ventures. Preliminary conversations have been rather one-sided as the frogs are mostly disinterested or ignoring my requests for their input.
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Project Updates

05/08/06 23:28:10 - Founders meeting firms up new direction for collab

This evening in Old Mission Creek the frogs sent a vaguely decisive message: we do not reliably respond to finger-snapping, we will tolerate your hand fart sounds, but we do not sing if you stand up. Also shiny pennywhistles can sometimes distract us.

[Play Video] Respectfully stay seated during performances In this audio clip the Old Mission Creek Frog Choir conveys plainly that audience members should respectfully stay seated during the performance.	[Play Video] Hand Sounds This audio clip shows that fart-like hand sounds are tolerated and perhaps encouraging to the Old Mission Creek Frog Choir.
[Play Video] Snap On Snap Off This audio clip illustrates that sometimes snapping encourages the frogs to begin to sing, and sometimes snapping makes them stop.

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Comment by Squid (05/09/06 13:29:33):
Fantastic! Have you tried playing back the recording to them? Would they go after you for making a bootleg copy?

05/23/06 11:54:58 - Research and FrogWatch signup

After having some acoustical interactions with the frog choir I thought it might be appropriate to go back and do a little a research into what other frog choir collaborators before me have found...

http://www.acoustics.org/press/swa9501.html
Frog Communication, research by Peter Narins
A short paper discussing the loudness and frequency distribution of competing male frogs. How can you, as a frog, be heard over the other males:
1. singing when they aren't singing.
2. singing a song with a dramatically different pitch.
3. singing more loudly.

http://www.nwf.org/frogwatchUSA/
FrogWatch a National Wildlife Federation project
A general interest site devoted to conservation and tracking of frog and toad populations - lots of good general information about identifying and interacting with frogs.

Frogwatch seems so interesting that I've decided to sign up as a frogwatch USA volunteer and to register my Old Mission Creek Frog Choir as a new research site #5269. Now I need to learn how to identify my frog collaborators.

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06/04/06 16:01:29 - Frogs and Robots

I'm considering how I might set up my laptop as a little model of the Mission Creek frog choir -- thank you Nichole for the idea -- beginning with some webcam brightness sensors adjusting the volume of the frogs I've been working with.

Along those lines I've been doing a little research and was reminded of Garnet Hertz's cockroach robot, which is quite a fun collaborative animal project; I've added this as another resource and will try to connect this entry to it. I also noted that in the past Garnet has rigged up a dead frog with galvanic response actuators that make the deceased frog move; I had a little trouble with this project after being sensitized by this interspecies collaboration class, but perhaps the web documentation isn't conveying the whole story.

On to some quick and dirty webcam / processing experiments.

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