Category Archives: Bioacoustics

Bioacoustics Science Soundscape

Soundscapes are featured by the NSF!

February 7, 2012 – 8:43 am

The National Science Foundation published yesterday a note featuring our Soundscapes work!

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Bioacoustics Papers Science Software Soundscape Ubuntu

New paper on our software to manage sound archives

December 15, 2011 – 12:25 pm

The paper describing our software Pumilio has just been published in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Pumilio is a web-based sound archive and analysis tool.

Pumilio was created out of necessity. Our lab was collecting a lot of sound data and there was no system that could help us manage that amount of data. In addition, we used at least two operating systems (Windows and Linux) and some collaborators even use Mac. On top of that, some of us used Chrome, while some used Firefox. We started just putting files in folders in a network share. After a few hundred files there is no way of keeping track. Plus, we were wasting time each time we had to open a file in Audacity or Raven to see its spectrogram.

One of the first instances of this system was a simple database that would display rows of spectrograms with a Flash mp3 player on the bottom of each. Similar to the “gallery” view of the current version of Pumilio. The problem was generating all those spectrograms. Using R was easy, but took too long to write the png files. The function specgram() in Python crashed with our files (15 minutes). After a while, I stumbled upon a Python script written by the people of Freesound.org. This was a very fast script and I took it and implemented it.

Afterwards it was all step by step. A JavaScript plugin built to crop images over the web became a selection tool for zooming in a sound and filtering.

The main idea is to make it easy to navigate a sound archive using any modern computer. This means using cross-browser tools to allow the use of any modern browser. Blueprint enables a consistent CSS, JQuery takes care of most of the JavaScript and some of the styling.

Screenshots of Pumilio:

Main Menu

Browsing the archive

All the data of a sound file

The software is available for free under an open source license from the project website.

Villanueva-Rivera, Luis J. and Bryan C. Pijanowski. 2012. Pumilio: A Web-Based Management System for Ecological Recordings. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 93:71–81. doi:10.1890/0012-9623-93.1.71. PDF. Full text. Pumilio Website.

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Bioacoustics Papers Science Soundscape

Special Issue of Landscape Ecology: Soundscape Ecology

November 28, 2011 – 9:04 am

The journal Landscape Ecology featured a special issue on Soundscape Ecology in their November 2011 number with Bryan C Pijanowski and Almo Farina as guest editors. The issue featured nine research articles with an editorial by the guest editors.

The issue is opened with a preface by Barry Truax and Gary W. Barrett.

Springer has free access to this journal until December 31, 2011.

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Bioacoustics Papers Science Sensors Soundscape

New scientific field will study ecological importance of sounds

March 1, 2011 – 1:20 pm

PRESS RELEASE

Luis J. Villanueva-Rivera, from right, Bryan Pijanowski and Sarah Dumyahn collect data from a remote listening post that records sounds from the surrounding area. (Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell)

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A Purdue University researcher is leading an effort to create a new scientific field that will use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape and to reconnect people with the importance of natural sounds.

Soundscape ecology, as it’s being called, will focus on what sounds can tell people about an area. Bryan Pijanowski, an associate professor of forestry and natural resources and lead author of a paper outlining the field in the journal BioScience, said natural sound could be used like a canary in a coal mine. Sound could be a critical first indicator of environmental changes.

Pijanowski said sound could be used to detect early changes in climate, weather patterns, the presence of pollution or other alterations to a landscape.

“The dawn and dusk choruses of birds are very characteristic of a location. If the intensity or patterns of these choruses change, there is likely something causing that change,” Pijanowski said. “Ecologists have ignored how sound that emanates from an area can help determine what’s happening to the ecosystem.” read more »

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Posted the data for the Acevedo and Villanueva 2006 paper

November 29, 2010 – 9:43 pm

I have just posted online the data used for the paper: Acevedo, M. A. and L. J. Villanueva-Rivera. 2006. Using automated digital recording systems as effective tools for the monitoring of birds and amphibians. Wildlife Society Bulletin 34:211-214.

This data has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License licence by the authors and can be used for educational and research purposes. I’ll appreciate if you let me know when and how you use this data.

Any commercial use is prohibited without the written authorization of the authors.

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Bioacoustics Science

World Listening Day this Sunday, July 18

July 12, 2010 – 12:28 pm

This Sunday is the World Listening Day, a day set up to celebrate the practice of listening, raise awareness about issues about sound projects, and design and implement educational initiatives. The date is the birthday of R. Murray Schafer, author of The Soundscape.

Visit their website for more information and lets promote the listening of our world, there is more than car alarms, A/C systems, and noise out there.

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Bioacoustics

What the Antartic waters sound like

February 1, 2010 – 10:19 am

Gizmodo recently featured an interesting scientific project that records the sounds from under the ice shelf in Antarctica. The best thing is that the sound is transmitted (almost) live on the Internet.

Two options for listening are available:

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Bioacoustics MySQL Open Science PHP Python

A web-based sound archive management and visualization system

January 26, 2010 – 10:30 am

About two years ago we started a project in which we we collecting several hundred recordings each week at different sites. In an instant, browsing this archive became a problem due to the difficulty in browsing files that we need to listen and look at their spectrograms to make sense. Back then I started to work on a web-based system to manage and browse the archive. What was then is now an open-source and free software system available in version 1.0: Pumilio.

The system is written mostly in PHP, with some Python scripts and Javascript. PHP provides the main interaction and communication with the MySQL database. Python is used to analyze the structure of the sound files and generate spectrogram and waveform images. Javascript, in particular the JQuery framework, provide some checks, notices and interactivity. The system has two sound players, one is based on Prototype and Soundmanager2 and was made by Freesound.org. The other is the JW Player.

A bit further into the project, we needed a way to select regions in the spectrograms. I designed a way to do it from a web browser with a bit of Javascript code, using the JCrop plugin, in addition to the PHP code.

Future enhancements include options for ultrasonic and infrasonic recordings, more tools, and improved archive and metadata management tools. If you are interested in testing it there is a demo available or you can download the current version from SourceForge.

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Bioacoustics

New automated recorder from Wildlife Acoustics

October 28, 2009 – 10:09 am

SM2Wildlife Acoustics have released a new version of their Song Meter automated digital recorder. Among the most interesting features are an even lower power consumption and twice the storage space.

It’ll be interesting to see where they take these boxes in the future.

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Bioacoustics Papers

New Paper: Comparing methods to automatically classify species’ calls

September 2, 2009 – 5:35 pm

A few days ago the paper appeared in the online list of Ecological Informatics:

Abstract below the fold.

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