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Acoustic monitoring is one of our biggest and most active groups, with members collecting, analysing, and interpreting acoustic data from across species, ecosystems, and applications, from animal vocalizations to sounds from our natural and built environment

discussion

Congo Basin activity?

greetings - I am helping coordinate a visit by the incoming director of national parks for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in mid-late June. He is very interested to...

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greetings!

 

i sent you a PM regarding this, feel free to contact me however is most convenient for you -

 

regards,

chris 

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discussion

Accessible acoustic analysis tech for blind scientist - ideas?

Hi all - I'm mentoring a student who is blind on a bioacoustics project to classify killer whale calls. Anyone out there have any experience with or ideas about making...

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Hey Kate I don't have any explicit ideas at the moment but will think on it - such a cool concept! I wonder if there's some form of tactile spectrogram that you could develop, or a way that you could have them try to draw a representation (so assign some shape) of what they are hearing as a means of classification a call and then clustering those shapes? There's a way of creating an image using foam and paper I believe so they could have a tactile record of those shapes. Guess it depends what you want to the quantitative results to be. Super cool that you are looking for greater accessibility in acoustics!!!

Hi Kate, 

We've developed a screen-reader workflow for a classification problem on our "Ocean Voices" Zooniverse project, which simply asks folks to label sounds based on what they hear and omits the spectrogram altogether. There are lots of screen-reader users who are active in the Zooniverse Talk forums, so they may have valuable input for you as well. 

Once a person has labeled data, I wonder if they could run automated detectors over the data in Pamguard, calculate features (using something like the R package PAMpal), and then use the BrailleR package to explore the statistics in R. This article has a pretty interesting summary about statistical software for visually impaired folks - might not be news to your student, but I thought it was pretty cool. 

I'm very curious what our friends who are visually impaired might notice in the acoustic data. Best of luck to you and your student! 

Cheers, 

Anne 

 

Hi Kate- ARISTA Lab (Advanced Research in Inclusion & STEAM Accessibility) is actively working on this through their eclispse soundscape project. I recommend reaching out to MaryKay to get the latest on their project.  

Megan

 

 

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discussion

Who's going to ESA in Portland this year?

So who is going to be at the Ecological Society of America meeting this year in Portland, August 6-11th?It will be my first time at the conference, so I won't know many people...

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Indeed, I'll be there too!  I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and one somewhere in a nearby park where we can look for wildlife.  The latter would probably be at an obscenely early hour, so we can drive somewhere, ideally see elk (there are elk within 25 minutes of Portland!), and still get back in time for the morning sessions.

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discussion

Global shortage of Raspberry Pis - What are the alternatives

So, there is a global shortage of Raspberry Pis, the open source micro-computer that has been popular amongst open hardware designers and hobbyists alike. Like...

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Have you considered Arduinos?

UPDATE: The Banana Pi didnt work out for us as it was not possible to track back all the components and ensure that they were responsibly sourced. The Rock board did work for us and we were able to port our system onto this. We will be rolling out units using this over the summer. It also looks like Raspberry Pis are coming back on line and we were able to secure a bulk order for deliver mid-summer

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discussion

Exploring storage options for mass data collection

Hi all. I'm currently exploring options for data storage en masse. With our project we will be collecting 24hr hydrophone data, drone video 6hr per day, photography &...

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Hi Adam!

I mostly live within the ecoacoustics space so I'll just speak on the hydrophone part of your request; Arbimon is a free web/cloud-based platform with unlimited storage for audio files. We've got an uploader app as well for mass-uploading lots of files. There's also a bunch of spectrogram visualization/annotation tools and analysis workflows available. It's AWS running under the hood.

I have some experience working directly with AWS & Microsoft Azure, and I've found personally that AWS was more user-friendly and intuitive for the (fairly simplistic) kinds of tasks I've done.  

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Link

Alex Rogers: Acoustic Devices for Biodiversity Monitoring — Smart Forests Atlas

In this radio episode, we speak to Alex Rogers, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. We discuss how Alex's research team developed the acoustic recording device AudioMoth, how low-cost technologies can democratise biodiversity monitoring, and how sensing technologies can lead to certain species and environments being monitored more than others.

Interviewers: Max Ritts and Michelle Westerlaken

Producer: Harry Murdoch

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discussion

AudioMoth and Song Meter Micro battery life tests

Our group recently tested the battery life of the AudioMoth and Song Meter Micro recorders under a variety of conditions (multiple sample rates, gain settings, device temperatures...

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Hi Justin, looks like the link is not working!

Hi Justin, 

Dropping in a question you've received over on twitter:

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article

The Arbimon newsletter is back! 

Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is bringing back the Arbimon newsletter for 2023! We're excited to share new features and tools of the platform, what's coming up, and some insights into our projects on bioacoustic...

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