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Acoustic Monitoring / Feed

Bioacoustic monitoring is one of our biggest and most active groups, with members collecting and analysing acoustic data from every type of wildlife, from birds and bats to big cats, and even reptiles!

careers

Conservation Innovation Manager

David Will

27 September 2023 11:08pm

Island Conservation's Innovation Team is dedicated to developing innovative, data-driven tools to increase the scale, scope, and pace of island restorations around the world. As the Conservation Innovation Manager, you...

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discussion

Song Meter Micro experience?

Nick Gardner

27 October 2022 6:33pm

Hi everyone, First off, what a great community this is! I only recently found out about it, and it seems like a game changer, especially for early career folk like me.I was...

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Nick Gardner

11 May 2023 4:38pm

Hi all, 

Thanks again to everyone who commented on this. I've been back from the field for a week or so, just catching up on things. Here are my thoughts on the Micro for anyone considering them.

Pros

- Durability/waterproofing. One literally ended up underwater for 2 days after a rapid flood event, and it was still working. No fish or dolphin recordings, sadly, but it worked for the rest of the season - good to know! No humidity issues either, I used two of the small desiccant packets per recorder, and changed them each time I changed the batteries. I haven't used the SM Mini, but I would imagine that having the foam mic windscreen might actually be a disadvantage in wet environments, as it surely gets saturated easily and dries slowly, potentially changing the mic's sensitivity. No foam or external components = fewer 

- Usability. This isn't specific to the Micro, but the app is great. For anyone who hasn't used Wildlife Acoustics before, it's a definite plus. Love the flexibility to have multiple schedules per day (e.g. full dawn chorus combined with 1-in-10 for the rest of the day). Being able to do everything, including change schedule, from a phone vs a laptop is a big plus. Admittedly I haven't checked the latest version of the AudioMoth configuration app, but last time I used it, it did not have the functionality of the SM app.

- Availability! This might be a dumb one, but good luck trying to get an AudioMoth... Even the SM Mini is currently on backorder, as are several of the other main options.

- Sound quailty. For some applications, it's perfectly fine, comparable to AudioMoth, but see main 'con' below.

Cons

- Uneven frequency response. This is a big one. As @Oliver_Metcalf pointed out, there is a strange peak in the f response at around 6kHz. It's on their website, but I had not quite appreciated how significant it is. It's a big deal IF you plan on doing soundscape analysis (e.g. acoustic indices), because it biases recordings towards the insect chorus. A lot of my recordings ended up with clipping distortion as a result of insects (cicadas, katydids) and even some frogs (sp.) This is less of an issue if you're listening for particular species, especially if it vocalises <6kHz, like most birds and frogs.

- Battery life (a). Admittedly, I should have done some more thorough testing with this one, like @jkitzes' lab. Based on a quick test and estimates, I thought the SM Micro should get ~100 hours of recording using Eneloop Pro batteries. What I actually got was around 80 hours on average, which is pretty bad, and meant that a lot more of my time was spent going to change batteries than originally planned. It was in lowland rainforest, so low temperature was not an issue. Sample rate was 32kHz. Potentially there was an issue with my battery charger, but I tested batteries and they seemed at full capacity. I don't know whether there is some incompatibility issue going on...

- Battery life (b). I also used Energizer Lithium batteries (the best ones) on a couple of deployments. Strangely, this did not dramatically improve things! I got 90-100 hours. However, when I changed the schedule for one of the recorders from '1 min on, 2 off, 24/7' to '1 min on, 0 off, 5am-6pm', that recorder lasted for 250hrs! I don't know if this was just a fluke, or if something about power cycling differences between schedule types has a big effect. It shouldn't, but that schedule got by far the longest battery life. 

Recommendations:

- Great for short-term deployments targeted at particular species (e.g. SDM ground-truthing, preliminary conservation monitoring)

- Probably better suited to temperate sites with less insect noise

- Test out different schedules to see if this really does affect battery life

- NOT good for soundscape analysis/acoustic indices 

Let me know if you have any questions/comments! Hope this is helpful to anyone thinking about these recorders.

Nick Gardner

11 May 2023 4:45pm

Hi Lucy, 

Sorry! I was in the field by the time you replied, and have not been back long. I realise it's been months now, but are you still planning on using the SM Micros? If so, please have a look at my thoughts in the new comment on this thread. I would think in Norway, the stridulating insect issue would not be as bad as in the tropics. Depends on what you want to use them for. Battery life is still definitely an issue though, and even more so in low temperatures. Good luck, let me know how you get on, or if you went with a different recorder.

Cheers,

Nick

Panji Gusti Akbar

26 September 2023 5:55am

Hi everyone. I am suuuuuper late on this discussion but I just finished 6-month fieldwork deploying 18 SM Micro over 70 different locations in Java, so I thought I would like to share my opinion on this device. So my work is basically installing each recorder in one location for the duration of 7-14 days before moving it to a different location, with battery and silica gel changed in between every deployment. Here's my thought:

Waterproofing - The first 2 months of the fieldwork was the wettest season I have ever experienced in the field. Extreme rain almost on a daily basis. Most of the time the recorder was working just fine except for the 2nd week of deployment when I found the inside a bit wet, but it was probably because I forgot to ensure that both lids were clicking.  The recorder still works fine after this deployment, and this was when I decided to change the silica gel before the next deployment.

Sound quality - As mentioned by others. there's an annoying peak at 6kHz. I did not originally plan to do soundscape analysis so it wasn't a big problem at the beginning, but now there is some discussion on doing so. Other than this I found the quality to be just adequate.

Battery Life - I am using alkaline 1,5 volt (non-rechargable) battery and get ~120 hours of recording, with a sample rate of 32khz. Suitable for my method, but certainly not for longer deployment.

Safety - My field site is full of a poacher who does not like to be detected, and the rangers warned me so many times about the camera trap that was destroyed or stolen by these people. I used steel cable and a small carabiner-style padlock which I later realized wouldn't stand a chance against a few hits of the machete, but luckily no recorder went missing--mostly because I tried to hide it as far as possible from the trails and cover our tracks. The small size of SM Micro makes it easy to hide among foliage (be careful on contact noise between leaves and recording), and the fact that it is colored green and has no external light also greatly helps (unlike Swiftone. Seriously, who thought that white is a perfect color for an expensive device that will be left in the forest for a long time?)

In conclusion, it is a cheap and easy-to-get device (compared to the mythical Audiomoth) for species presence detection in a short time like I did, but certainly not for longer deployment or more intricate bioacoustic analysis. 

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discussion

Searching for researchers working in Africa

Andrew Carter

25 September 2023 1:57am

Hi all,I work for World Vision Australia on a project called "Scale Up FMNR" (Famer Managed Natural Regeneration). At its most simple level, FMNR is a practice that encourages...

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Esther Githinji

25 September 2023 9:07am

Hi Andrew,

Great to hear about what you are currently working on. Based on the scope of your work, here are some organisations working across East Africa that could be useful to connect with:

1. Komaza

2. GainForest

Best wishes.

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discussion

Soil Ecoacoustics - viable?

Stephanie O'Donnell

12 September 2023 1:29pm

Hi everyone, A colleague is keen to get a gauge on the potential of soil ecoacoustic tech. They are asking - it appears to be quite simple and practical tech, is it viable...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

19 September 2023 9:03am

Awesome, thanks a lot carlos! I've shared with the person who asked me. 

if you're up for it, I also may steal you for a variety hour spot on this at some point, as now i'm curious to hear more! 

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event

The Variety Hour: September

Stephanie O'Donnell

20 September 2023 11:39am

Join us this month to hear about developing a Polar Bear satellite ear tag transmitter, how 3D tech is being used in forest ecology, Digital Earth Africa's work to make Earth Observation data open and accessible for the...

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article

In case you missed it...

Stephanie O'Donnell

12 September 2023 11:49am

Five #tech4wildlife people, projects and updates that caught our attention this month. An AI supported bear early warning system, a project that's connecting indigenous communities with high speed internet, exploring...

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Lars Holst Hansen

13 September 2023 6:23am

Hi Steph! Nice with this "sporadic series"! The bear alarm in China reminds me of the Bear Repeller by the Hack the Planet guys:/Lars
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discussion

Which market-available microphones, accelerometers and GIS sensors for dogs / pets ?

Luigi

7 September 2023 3:21pm

I have conducted an MSc thesis in data-science applied on bioacoustics data, and wish to carry on some experiments on my own now, using domestic environment as a lab.I am looking...

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Lars Holst Hansen

11 September 2023 4:33pm

 

Hi Luigi!

 

You should have a look at the μMoth 

https://github.com/OpenAcousticDevices/Datasheets/blob/main/uMoth_Datasheet/uMoth_Datasheet.pdf

 developed by @alex_rogers and others from Open Acoustics Devices:

As an alternative audiologger meant to be animal borne, check out the Audiologger developed by Simon Chamaillé-Jammes @schamaille et al :

Energy-Efficient Audio Processing at the Edge for Biologging Applications

Biologging refers to the use of animal-borne recording devices to study wildlife behavior. In the case of audio recording, such devices generate large amounts of data over several months, and thus require some level of processing automation for the raw data collected. Academics have widely adopted offline deep-learning-classification algorithms to extract meaningful information from large datasets, mainly using time-frequency signal representations such as spectrograms. Because of the high deployment costs of animal-borne devices, the autonomy/weight ratio remains by far the fundamental concern. Basically, power consumption is addressed using onboard mass storage (no wireless transmission), yet the energy cost associated with data storage activity is far from negligible. In this paper, we evaluate various strategies to reduce the amount of stored data, making the fair assumption that audio will be categorized using a deep-learning classifier at some point of the process. This assumption opens up several scenarios, from straightforward raw audio storage paired with further offline classification on one side, to a fully embedded AI engine on the other side, with embedded audio compression or feature extraction in between. This paper investigates three approaches focusing on data-dimension reduction: (i) traditional inline audio compression, namely ADPCM and MP3, (ii) full deep-learning classification at the edge, and (iii) embedded pre-processing that only computes and stores spectrograms for later offline classification. We characterized each approach in terms of total (sensor + CPU + mass-storage) edge power consumption (i.e., recorder autonomy) and classification accuracy. Our results demonstrate that ADPCM encoding brings 17.6% energy savings compared to the baseline system (i.e., uncompressed raw audio samples). Using such compressed data, a state-of-the-art spectrogram-based classification model still achieves 91.25% accuracy on open speech datasets. Performing inline data-preparation can significantly reduce the amount of stored data allowing for a 19.8% energy saving compared to the baseline system, while still achieving 89% accuracy during classification. These results show that while massive data reduction can be achieved through the use of inline computation of spectrograms, it translates to little benefit on device autonomy when compared to ADPCM encoding, with the added downside of losing original audio information.

MDPI

This one can also log acceleration and magnetometry! We have recently deployed it on muskoxen in Greenland.

For a GPS tracker, you may want take a look at the SnapperGPS by @JonasBchrt & @alex_rogers :

SnapperGPS - Home

Home page of SnapperGPS - A small, low-cost, low-power wildlife tracking system.

As an alternative the i-gotU GPS logger may be of interest:

i-gotU GT-120B GPS / GNSS Data Logger - Water Resistant, 21g only, Managing Large Deployments with Ease (2022 Edition)

(USB / Wireless dual interfaces, GPS and QZSS multiple constellations, Windows, Android and IOS compatible) Compared to previous models (i.e. GT 120) which are GPS, GT-120B is a GNSS logger that utilizes both GPS and QZSS constellations. It has multi-path detection, which dramatically eliminates Ionospheric error and multi-path effects. Compared to previous GPS models, the data accuracy is significantly better.  GT-120B has usb and wireless dual interfaces, which allows data  to be  downloaded either via either usb or wirelessly. Rather than using the proprietary USB cable for GT-120, GT-120B uses a standard micros-usb cable.  GT-120B can be used as an usb GNSS receiver with 1-10Hz update rates. When used as a GNSS data logger, the update rate is 1 Hz. Managing large deployments of GT-120B with ease The I-gotU GT-120B comes with mobile and Windows apps which help manage a large number of loggers.  1. You can view all your GT-120B devices on Google maps from your mobile phone app. 2. You can self define a group, add loggers to the group and select tracks from the group. 3. From your mobile phone, you can keep track of battery and memory statuses of all your GT-120B devices. 4. Not only can you backup your device settings, you can also standardize the settings of a bunch of devices by using import / export features. 5. If you want to protect the GT-120B data from unauthorized downloads, you can enable password check settings. 6. GT-120B can be turned on / off by a predefined schedule. Battery runtime by GPS log interval GPS log interval Battery runtime 1 sec 5 sec 15hr 10 sec 25hr 15 sec 60hr 30 sec 120hr 60 sec 180hr 60 min 2 months Logging configuration options Configurable GPS Logging interval 1sec~60min59sec Circular Logging YES POI YES Scheduled Logging YES Merge scheduled waypoints YES Smart Tracking YES Power triggered auto-logging YES    Technical Spec: Dimension 44.5x28.5x13.8mm Weight 21.5g Wireless connect with mobile phones Yes  Wireless Chipset Nordic nRF 52820 Wireless range 20m GPS Chipset MTK MT3337 Antenna Patch Antenna Channels   22 tracking / 66 acquisition-channel GPS receiver; Supports up to 210 PRN channels; GNSS support GPS & QZSS SBAS support WAAS/EGNOS/MSAS/GAGAN Other enhancement     12 multi-tone active interference cancellers (with ISSCC2011 award); Indoor and outdoor multi-path detection and compensation; Internal real-time clock (RTC); RTCM ready YES NEMA support NMEA 0183 standard V3.01 and backward compliance. Supports 219 different data update rates for position 10 Hz GPS Sensitivity Acquisition: -148 dBm (cold) / -163 dBm(hot) Tracking: -165 dBm Cold Start < 35sec Warm Start < 34sec Hot Start <1 sec USB cable micro-usb, USB 2.0 Battery 380mAh LED Blue & Red Operating Temperature -10 ~ +50°C Water-resist YES GPS Logger YES GPS Receiver USB Memory 65000 Motion Detection NO Disable Button YES Disable Wireless YES Disable LED flashing YES Setup wireless download password YES Enable wireless upon schedule YES Configure wireless broadcast interval YES Broadcast latest GPS position YES Configure wireless TX Power (output power of wireless signal) YES Rename device (such as nickname) YES Power Saving Option above 7sec NO Firmware update via PC software Device configuration via USB or wirelessly Data download via USB or wirelessly Combined maps YES GPS Data Import format GPX GPS Data Export format GPX, CSV  Software and compatibility: GT-120B comes with below software: Windows App: compatible with Windows 7, 8, 10 & 10 IOS App: compatible with IOS 12 and above Android App: compatible with Android 7 and above “I-gotU GPS” IOS / Android apps: GT-120B can connect to the “I-gotU GPS” app on iphone/Android wirelessly. The “I-gotU GPS” app has the below features: Wireless configurationInstead of connecting through a USB cable, you can now wirelessly change configuration settings of GT-120B through the iphone/Android app. Wireless data downloadYou can wirelessly download the log data from GT-120B to your smartphone. Battery and memory status on AppTo check the status of the device’s battery and memory, open the "i-gotU GPS" app. Find my Device on Google MapYou can view the locations of your devices on Google maps from your mobile phone.    “I-gotU GPS” Windows application: The new “I-gotU GPS” Windows software has the below new features: playback group movement measure distance from waypoint A to B. measure distance from different anchor points. Package content: 1 x GPS logger; 1 x USB cable; (Does NOT comes with Jelly case or fastening strap.)   Youtube videos:   - i-gotU GT-120B / GT-600B Youtube video   Documents:   - User Guide   - side by side comparison for GT-120, GT-600, GT-120B and GT600B   Sample Data Downloads:   - Sample Data File in CSV format (original data recorded by GT-120B)  - Sample Data File in GPX format (original data recorded by GT-120B)     Blogs: - How to reset the i-gotU GT-120B / GT-600B device? - Side by side comparison for GT-120, GT-600, GT-120B and GT600B   - When charging multiple GT-120B/GT-600B devices simultaneously, please avoid the following.   Software Downloads: (To download the app for Windows, iOS or Android devices, simply click the link below that corresponds to your device.)  

CanadaGPS.ca

DIY Instructions

After the two day acclimation period, with the GPS is programed, insert the GPS unit into the case and proceed to track your cat for a 10 day period.

Cat Tracker 2.0

Regarding your question on sampling frq: We have been using 8Hz (and 10 Hz on the Audiologger Acceleration logging) for our slow moving muskoxen. For an animal like a dog, you probably want to sample at somewhat higher frq. This group used 50Hz in a study of arctic fox: 

Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry - Movement Ecology

Background Biologging now allows detailed recording of animal movement, thus informing behavioural ecology in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. In particular, combining GPS and accelerometry allows spatially explicit tracking of various behaviours, including predation events in large terrestrial mammalian predators. Specifically, identification of location clusters resulting from prey handling allows efficient location of killing events. For small predators with short prey handling times, however, identifying predation events through technology remains unresolved. We propose that a promising avenue emerges when specific foraging behaviours generate diagnostic acceleration patterns. One such example is the caching behaviour of the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), an active hunting predator strongly relying on food storage when living in proximity to bird colonies. Methods We equipped 16 Arctic foxes from Bylot Island (Nunavut, Canada) with GPS and accelerometers, yielding 23 fox-summers of movement data. Accelerometers recorded tri-axial acceleration at 50 Hz while we obtained a sample of simultaneous video recordings of fox behaviour. Multiple supervised machine learning algorithms were tested to classify accelerometry data into 4 behaviours: motionless, running, walking and digging, the latter being associated with food caching. Finally, we assessed the spatio-temporal concordance of fox digging and greater snow goose (Anser caerulescens antlanticus) nesting, to test the ecological relevance of our behavioural classification in a well-known study system dominated by top-down trophic interactions. Results The random forest model yielded the best behavioural classification, with accuracies for each behaviour over 96%. Overall, arctic foxes spent 49% of the time motionless, 34% running, 9% walking, and 8% digging. The probability of digging increased with goose nest density and this result held during both goose egg incubation and brooding periods. Conclusions Accelerometry combined with GPS allowed us to track across space and time a critical foraging behaviour from a small active hunting predator, informing on spatio-temporal distribution of predation risk in an Arctic vertebrate community. Our study opens new possibilities for assessing the foraging behaviour of terrestrial predators, a key step to disentangle the subtle mechanisms structuring many predator–prey interactions and trophic networks.

BioMed Central

 

 

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Link

Large scale bioacoustic analysis in the Peruvian Amazon

Geoff Carss

1 September 2023 1:49pm

It's relatively easy to collect vast amounts of audio data - it's not so easy to analyse it and get consistent results. The Wilder Sensing platform enables users to upload vast quantities of audio which is then analysed using ML models such as BirdNET - read Auroras story.

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Exploring the Symphony of the Peruvian Amazon

Aurora Gonzalo Tarodo recalls her experience collecting a vast bioacoustic dataset using the Wilder Sensing platform. Her work was carried out as part of her PhD field work at the University of Gloucestershire.

Link

Estimating California Spotted Owl population with bioacoustic survey

Ellie Warren

29 August 2023 1:55am

News about a population survey of California Spotted Owls using 1,600 autonomous recording units in the Sierra Nevada region. Machine learning made analyzing this acoustic data possible at this large scale for the first time.

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careers

Reviewing Now: Animal Telemetry Postdoctoral Fellowship

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

24 August 2023 11:09pm

The Smithsonian Institution seeks a field- and data-oriented biologist to support marine animal telemetry research and to assist with activities of the Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry (ACT) Network. 

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discussion

Building a new recording device for sound localization

Kim Hendrikse

20 June 2023 11:57am

Hi all, Nice group! I'm building an acoustic monitoring device that I wanted to share as it may be of interest to some people and also I'd like to know of any requirements that...

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Kim Hendrikse

12 August 2023 10:26am

Thanks! Yes, I'm using the libraries from opensoundscape and it was Tessa who pointed me to wildlabs :) I'll publish the source code to the sound capture code this weekend in github with minimal instructions on configuring the rest of the OS till I get time to write an article about it which won't be till I've built 5x articles and done a convincing field test for a motivating article. Note, although I learnt how to configure the time synchronization with PPS from other articles on the net some steps were missed out that were vital to getting a fast and good sync, I'll be publishing these. Specifically, the start order of the gps versus chrony needs to be reversed from the default otherwise the PPS signal is not being communicated via shared memory to chrony which ruins the convergence to accurate time. Along with allowing the chrony time server daemon to step the clock so long as the alignment has > 1 ms of difference.



Simulations with opensoundscape suggest really, really good accuracy with the soundfinder algorithm is possible. When we get closer to new years eve I'll get really good test data from all the illegal fireworks that get set off here.



Once the capture side of things is sorted I'll move on to finding a good inference algorithm that performs well on the raspberry pi and then to working on a central server to correlate all of this automatically with the goal to making something that sends out an alert to a google maps link as to the location of the source, that will be fun :)



Oh and actually, I have to finish the install code for my other project that links computer vision algorithms to a state management and alerting system. This runs on jetson series SBCs. I've ported it all to the new Jetson Orin series computers but haven't yet finished writing the install code because I got distracted with this project about 4 months ago. The computer vision alerting state machine thing is here, and it's also useful in the fight against poachers. The new Orin series from nvidia allow the highest scoring open source computer vision algorithms (based on the microsoft coco dataset) to be integrated, such as yolov6, which results in significantly less false positives. And the state management facilities of my app provide you with a large amount of flexibility to reduce this even further.

Kim Hendrikse

13 August 2023 3:28pm

As promised, I've pushed the code to github today, the URL is:



 

Note, this is somewhat of a premature announcement (to keep my promise) because I still need to add a bunch of documentation and how to install the prerequisites, recommended way of deploying etc.



However, for the curious, it is a very simple program. And so long as you install jackd2 and the prerequisites to the build script (./build.sh) it will run on whatever system you have and accurately align the sound files to the system time, along with the tracking file.



Much of the work surrounding this project was working out how to setup the GPS synced system time correctly. There are several guides on how to do this, however, when I tried to run this on a system that was disconnected from the network I found that there were important steps omitted in the guides that were needed to provide fast and accurate syncing in the absence of any network. I'll be adding these steps to this repository over time and write up a nice article about it once I've done the field tests. With the changes I made when installing the time sync changes the current system will sync to sub microsecond accuracy within a minute from when 5 satellites are locked.

Kim Hendrikse

24 August 2023 12:52pm

I've tested a Petterson ultrasonic microphone with a sample rate of 384khz and it works out of the box with this software as well. Would be cool to sound localize some bats.

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discussion

Hydromoth settings

Robin Sandfort

9 May 2022 5:03pm

Hi Everyone,what is your #HydroMoth setup for freshwater ecoacoustic monitoring? What are your settings for underwater recording with your AudioMoth? I would love to dicuss...

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Frontier Labs Australia

17 July 2023 3:05am

Hi Ian, are you in Brisbane? We're based in Brisbane also. You can borrow a few BARLT and Aquarian Audio hydrophones for a little while to compare against your hydromoth. We have localisation also using the inbuilt GPS and software to time align the calls. It'll probably save you time. You can run a microphone and hydrophone on a cable on the one recorder.

Chewbacca1

11 August 2023 8:10pm

Hi Ian,

I have hours of an unidentified creature recorded during overnight recording sessions with mutliple hydrophones. We think it is platypus but there is nothing to compare against that isn't from captive sounds. I am waiting on the Hydromoth to become available again so I can do longer term monitoring.

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Link

Acoustic Monitoring and AI to Recognize Elephant Sounds & Gunshots

Ellie Warren

9 August 2023 11:11pm

This article discusses Cornell's bioacoustics work with AI tools to recognize both elephant "voices" as well as gunshots. The elephant rumbles analyzed in this work are almost imperceptible to the human ear, but can be clearly detected with technology.

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Listening to the Giants: Protecting Forest Elephants Through Audio Monitoring

In the dense rainforests of Central Africa, a captivating endeavor is underway, driven by researchers from Cornell University. Their mission? To track and protect elephants through the power of audio monitoring. These majestic creatures emit resounding rumbles at an incredibly low frequency, nearly imperceptible to the human ear. These deep calls, traversing vast distances, serve as a concealed communication network for elephants, veiled from our understanding for centuries. Jul 28, 2023

article

#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Judges' Panel Honorees

WILDLABS Team

4 August 2023 10:00am

Please join us in celebrating this year’s top #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge Honorees as chosen by our panel of leading conservation organization judges, and enjoy the story contained within these entries about how our...

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discussion

Detection and removing of windy events in wild acoustic recordings

Francesca Terranova

12 June 2023 1:28pm

Hello to everyone, I have to clean my dataset of recordings concerning an African penguin colony inhabits the South African coast. In particular, since I have recordings with days...

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Lars Holst Hansen

1 July 2023 12:46am

Interesting subject! 

I work on the tundra in Northeast Greenland and we get some quite high winds.

I am right now testing wrapping our AudioMoths with a simple windjammer. It will not work in the strongest winds, but in many cases it will reduce clipping.

I am using the Røde Dead Kitten which seem to fit perfectly! Only issue is that the last batch I got had a much tighter elastic band (perhaps something went wrong in production or they changed it).

Cheers,

Lars

Stephanie O'Donnell

12 July 2023 4:07pm

Hi everyone! 

@baddiwad was one of our fantastic speakers in our June Variety Hour show, so we had the chance to hear about her work in a lot more detail. If you're interested in finding out more about Franscesca's project, catch up here: 

Frank van der Most

19 July 2023 12:21am

Audacity has a noise filter which one 'trains' on a piece of recorded noise. Perhaps it is worth a shot. Freeware, open source, and with a community of developers and users.

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discussion

LABMaker

Tom August

6 June 2023 3:31pm

Does anyone have experience of LABMaker?Has it been good? Bad? Any comments or feedback? We are looking for groups who could help us to manufacture a piece of open hardware. Also...

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Christos Astaras

17 June 2023 10:36am

Dear Tom, the AudioMoths are being sold via LabMakers (but I do not know if they construct them for them). Have you been in touch with the AudioMoth team?  I am sure they will be able to provide you useful feedback regarding what you are trying to do, and LabMakers.

I have only used them to buy things from them.

Regards, Christos

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