eli5: How do audio engineers & producers isolate sounds from recordings?

Question

Say you found a weird bird on the street & wanted to record it’s call. How would you remove wind & traffic noise?

In: 2

Answer 1

Sound engineer here. It’s less about “taking away other sounds” than it is about “focusing on this particular sound.”
Nothing in sound is really a happy accident, as you have to plan and set up to record particular audio.
A shotgun mic or 416 for example, is specifically directional. It is built to pick up specific sound waves rather than room ambience.
There’s a lot more to it obviously, but let’s just say we have the technology to pick up what we want, and filter out the rest.