Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, spent his life putting together what he called a “a depository of the sounds and music of the world.” Early releases, of drum solos and logging camp songs and folk music from Palestine, Haiti, France, and Ethiopia, were joined by recordings that were less traditionally musical. Later titles included Science Fiction Sound Effects Record and End the Cigarette Habit through Self-Hypnosis. (The Smithsonian Institution acquired the 2,168-item catalog after Asch’s death, on the condition that they would ensure every recording could be made available on demand.)
Sometime around the early 1950s, Asch met Bogert, the curator of amphibians and reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Among zoologists, Bogert was an early adopter of the portable tape recorder, which set him up well to participate in Asch’s burgeoning “Science Series.” This had begun somewhat unscientifically, with Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America, patched together from recordings made of birds at the Bronx Zoo, crickets in Connecticut, and—when there was a need for more rain sounds—a Manhattan bathtub lined with newspaper.
Bogert pursued accuracy rather than vibes. He really wanted listeners to get into the vocal stylings of frogs, animals that, as he wrote in the record’s introductory essay, probably possessed “the first voice in existence,” from tens of millions of years “before man had the wit to chop out an arrow point.” The record takes the form of a lecture: carefully recorded calls alternating with Bogert’s explanations of who is making them, how, and why it matters. The liner notes describe the lengths that he went to in order to record his subjects—grabbing gopher frogs to elicit their serrated warning croaks, paddling a dugout canoe into Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico to bottle the Pátzcuaro frogs’ winter mating chorus, and handling tense studio moments like the one described above, which happened at Florida’s Archbold Biological Station.
Frogs use calls to find each other, identify members of their own species, express personal and territorial boundaries, and attract mates. Listening to Sounds of North American Frogs, it’s possible to understand how a dedicated listener can begin to decode these messages. With Bogert’s help, one can learn to differentiate not only between the chirr of the pickerel frog and the rumble of the giant toad, but even between the screeches of Fowler’s toads in Arkansas and North Carolina. (Both sound like they’re auditioning to die in a slasher film, but the North Carolina toad is going to get the part.)
