Animals communicate through a variety of modalities including visual, auditory and chemical. Acoustic signals are particularly well suited for studying the evolution of animal communication due to the relative ease in which sounds can be recorded and analyzed. Therefore, a thorough overview of acoustic communication is a fundamental aspect of any animal behavior course. The purpose of this lab exercise is to introduce students to bioacoustics, or the study of animal sounds and their habitats. For the field component, students use their smartphones to collect focal recordings of target animals as well as collect acoustic data that will be used to investigate variation in soundscapes at different times (e.g. dawn and dusk) and/or different locations (e.g., urban versus rural). The computer lab component utilizes the R programming environment to import sound files and visualize differences in acoustic data using both spectrograms and principal component analysis biplots. The computer lab exercises are meant for undergraduate students with relatively little coding background but could be easily adapted for students of different skill levels. All materials needed to use and modify the course materials are openly available on GitHub, which should remove any financial barriers for students or instructors.