Of acoustic and physical barriers in spanish timbrado education systems

Breeding Cages E. Ramos

This year has got complicated a little  with regards to the physical space allocated to the canaries at home ( so you already can figure out who calls the shots at home !), so I will be forced to go back to the 2010 physical arrangement using rather an acoustic barrier than a physical. To start with, let’s make clear that a physical barrier (as suggested by its name) is one that isolates the two main areas of a song canaries premises, namely breeding area and education area. An acoustic barrier is one that isolates two close areas from a sound perspective.

 In 2010, even having adults in the same room as close as one meter, the acoustiv barrier worked out smoothly and I could obtain a good group of birds with clean repertoire, some of them with neither timbres nor rodadas (yes, neither timbres nor rodadas, see the post in this blog:  Sin Timbres ni Rodadas). Of course a physical barrier is safest but the space is a critical variable in the ecuation and one needs to know how to establish an acoustic barrier properly.

The space I have available for my birds is 8 sqm2=4 long, 2 wide). In the middle of the room I installed an sliding acoustic insulation door but to really secure the outcome I just installed a second independent audio system that just covers the breeding area. This I decided to do it after noticing several cocks were constantly singing the same passage stimulated by the proximity of hens.

 

Acoustic barrier layout

This secondary audio system does not contain any note of the main audio education system, the reason for this is that when the same notes are played at the same time a peculiar echo is generated that might be misinterpreted by the learning birds. Additionally, the reproduction schedule must be programmed in such way that there is always one of them being played.

And last but not least, the second audio must be as clean and worked out as the main one. You will notice that some smart young canary will retain a couple of these notes learned during his first thirty days of life and will not drop them even if he only is exposed to the main audio for the rest of his education period (see the entrance in this blog: cuando aprenden los canarios timbrados).

This explains why some birds have unwanted notes in their repertoire even though the education systems isolated them from the 30th day of life.