Bill McQuay
Bill McQuay is an audio producer with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. For fifteen years McQuay was an NPR sound engineer and technical director for NPR programs including Morning Edition, Weekend Saturday and Sunday, Performance Today and NPR's Radio Expeditions. Radio Expeditions is where McQuay began his long time collaboration with NPR science correspondent Christopher Joyce, a creative relationship that continues today.
McQuay led NPR's early surround-sound recording effort and was its first technical director. Many of these surround-sound recordings were featured in Radio Expeditions Presents, a public event sponsored by NPR and its member stations throughout the country. In 2007, McQuay, along with a team from NPR and the National Geographic Society, presented a 'Concert of Animal Sounds' in the Forbidden City Concert Hall Beijing, China featuring the surround sound recordings from Radio Expeditions. McQuay was also the mastering engineer for NPR Classics CD's.
In addition to his recent work with Christopher Joyce heard on Morning Edition, McQuay has recently collaborated with NPR Senior Interactive Designer Wes Lindamood to create a series of 'made for headphone listening' soundscapes available on NPR's Sound Cloud.
McQuay's work with NPR has received a variety of awards including a Grammy for the NPR recording of the Benjamin Britten War Requiem in 2000, a 2001 Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Journalism award with the Radio Expeditions reporting and editing team, and a 2002 individual artist award from the Maryland State Arts Council. In 2016 McQuay shared in the Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the NPR series Close Listening: Decoding Nature Through Sound.
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Forty years ago, NASA sent two spacecraft into space with images and recordings from Earth. To test whether aliens would be able to hear them, scientists ran the messages by animals, as proxies.
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Scientists eavesdropping in trees have decoded a high stakes game of hide and seek. Katydids rely on ultrasound to find mates and listen for bats, which use ultrasound to find the bugs, and eat them. -
The National Park Service is racing to record soundscapes of each park that capture nature for the ear. "If we start to lose sounds of wilderness, we start to lose a piece of us," one scientist says.
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Microscopes illuminate the tiny. But sound? Scientists didn't really see it as all that important, until an amazing invention came along that opened new worlds: the stethoscope. -
Sound gets into our brains and processed so quickly that it shapes all other perceptions, says neuroscientist Seth Horowitz. "You hear anywhere from 20 to 100 times faster than you see."
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It can take more than just a keen ear to figure out what animals are saying. Sometimes, scientists are learning, you have to talk back to map the rich networks of conversation in a forest. -
For some insects, sound waves or vibrations are the real social media — high-speed rumbles sent through the air and along leaf stems to help the bugs claim territory, send warnings and find mates. -
The trumpeting roar of an elephant is loud. But scientists living with herds in the forests of central Africa say the deep rumbles that humans can't hear, but can feel, carry crucial messages, too. -
Listening To Whale Migration Reveals A Sea Of Noise Pollution, TooChristopher Clark, an engineer turned whale biologist, wired the world's oceans with hydrophones. Whales sing as they migrate, he learned. And the ship sounds clouding the ocean can deeply interfere. -
It Took A Musician's Ear To Decode The Complex Song In Whale CallsMale humpback whales create "songs" together, scientists say. Katy Payne was the first to hear the shifts in pitch and pattern in the collective calls as complex music — haunting, evolving tunes.
