Extensible bioacoustical analysis software: Two examples

Abstract

Two extensible software tools for bioacoustical analysis have been developed by the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Each tool provides a framework for sound visualization and analysis, supporting both manual selection and automatic detection of acoustic events in arbitrarily long recordings, manual annotation and automatic measurement of properties of these events, and management of the created acoustic metadata. The acoustic events of interest might include animal vocalizations and/or anthropogenic sounds. Simple examples of measurable event properties include duration, total energy, and spectrum. More advanced measurements might classify sounds according to the species or individuals that produced them, or estimate the location of a vocalizing animal. Both software tools can be extended in various ways, including the addition of new detectors and measurements. It has been found that this extensibility adds great value to the tools by allowing them to be readily adapted for new applications by bioacousticians or others with programming ability. It has also been found that such tools greatly facilitate the development of new detection and measurement algorithms by allowing prototype algorithms to be rapidly evaluated. Several case studies are presented that illustrate these principles. [Work supported in part by NSF.]