Arthur Augustus Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg made the first recordings of bird sound on May 18, 1929, in an Ithaca park. They used
motion-picture film with synchronized sound to record a
song sparrow, a
house wren, and a
rose-breasted grosbeak. This was the Beginning of
Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Graduate student
Albert R. Brand and Cornell undergraduate M. Peter Keane developed recording equipment for use in the open field. In the next two years they had successfully recorded more than 40 species of birds. In 1931, Peter Keane and True McLean (a Cornell professor in
electrical engineering) designed and built a
parabolic reflector for field recordings of bird songs. They used
World War I parabola molds from the Cornell Physics Department. In 1940,
Albert R. Brand produced an extensive bird song field guide album "American Bird Songs". The sales of
phonograph records of bird sounds remained a key source of income for the Lab of Ornithology since these days. In 2020 the
Internet Bird Collection (IBC) was incorporated into the Macaulay Library, which now hosts all of the content contained in the IBC. == Recording data ==