Abstract
Passive acoustic monitoring of wildlife requires sound recording systems. Several cheap, high-performance open-source solutions currently exist for recording soundscapes, but all of them are still reliant on commercial microphones. Commercial microphones are relatively expensive, specialized for particular taxa, and often have incomplete technical specifications. We designed Sonitor, an open-source microphone system to address all needs of ecologists that sample terrestrial wildlife acoustically. We evaluated the cost and durability of our system and measured trade-offs that are seldom acknowledged but which universally limit microphones' functions: weatherproofing versus sound attenuation, windproofing versus transmission loss after rain, signal loss in long cables, and analog sound amplification versus directivity with acoustic horns. We propose five microphone configurations suiting different budgets (from 8 to 33 EUR per unit), and fulfilling different sound quality and flexibility requirements. The Sonitor system consists of sturdy acoustic sensors that cover the entire sound frequency spectrum of sonant terrestrial wildlife at a fraction of the cost of commercial microphones.
Highlights
Passive acoustic monitoring of wildlife requires sound recording systems
We discuss aspects of microphone protection and sound quality, and we present the general design of Sonitor microphones, along with 5 concrete microphone types that can be used for different use cases to record all terrestrial wildlife
There are mainly two types of microphones used in autonomous sound recorders: electric condenser microphones (ECM) and microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) microphones
Summary
Passive acoustic monitoring of wildlife requires sound recording systems. High-performance open-source solutions currently exist for recording soundscapes, but all of them are still reliant on commercial microphones. We designed Sonitor, an opensource microphone system to address all needs of ecologists that sample terrestrial wildlife acoustically. We evaluated the cost and durability of our system and measured trade-offs that are seldom acknowledged but which universally limit microphones' functions: weatherproofing versus sound attenuation, windproofing versus transmission loss after rain, signal loss in long cables, and analog sound amplification versus directivity with acoustic horns. We propose five microphone configurations suiting different budgets (from 8 to 33 EUR per unit), and fulfilling different sound quality and flexibility requirements. The Sonitor system consists of sturdy acoustic sensors that cover the entire sound frequency spectrum of sonant terrestrial wildlife at a fraction of the cost of commercial microphones
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have