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Acoustics / Feed

Acoustic 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

Microphone Choices for Bird and Amphibian Bioacoustic Research

I am looking for recommendations on the microphones to conduct bird and amphibian bioacoustic research, that I am conducting in South America. My partner organization and I are...

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Or you could use my sbts-aru project. Which is free software that runs on Raspberry Pis. It also allows you to perform sound localization remotely if required, without bringing the SD card back. Last night I had a listen to some calls in the jungle from Lajuma research center in South Africa that was recorded with them. @nlubcker  and I expect to do some localization tests soon from the species down there.



If your Pi is connected to a network you can do localization in near real time (less than 10 minutes manually) as you don't have to stop the recorder or post process the recordings. If you write you own pipeline you can implement real-time sound localization with it and output a URL to a google maps location.



 

My advice for microphones is the em272 microphone capsules based ones, which are very high quality microphones used as by the Swedish company Telinga in their parabolic microphones. That's what I use. They are very low noise and very sensitive. Here's a link to one, likely hard to get at your side of the world though.



 

In my testing they appeared to be similar in performance to some Rode clip microphones and similar in price. They are likely more easily obtained where you are.

Como dijo Carly, Audiomoths y Song Meter Micro, son los que mas te recomiendo. lo unico a tener en cuenta es que para audiomoths vas a tener que comprar o armar alguna especie de cajita protectora. los de Wildlife acoustic, ya viene con protección, solo recomiendo hacer un "techo" con algun plastico. 

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discussion

Project Showcase: "Global Birdsong Radio" - A distributed edge-to-cloud acoustic sensor network using live streams

Hello everyone,I am a hobbyist software developer and nature enthusiast, and while I don’t have a background in ornithology or academic biology, I wanted to share an open-source...

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This is really impressive Avi! Would you mind sharing what kind of hardware the local ingestion + detection is running on? 

It's a fun experiment to think if this could be expanded to any live stream happening on any platform (Instagram, TikTok)

Avi

Hi Luke, 

The local hardware is just a laptop and a few SIM routers.

I guess the heart of it is the user experience, where the users can navigate their own choice of nature real time stream mosaic.

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discussion

Nature Tech Unconference - Anyone attending?

Hi all, anyone planning to attend the Nature Tech Unconference on 28th March at the London School of Economics Campus in London, UK? (the event is free to attend but...

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Myself and the Fauna & Flora Conservation Technology team will be there (@Chelsea_Smith  and @ugyenpenjor ) and also the WILDLABS team @HRees ! See you!

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discussion

Custom Hydrophone Records Dolphins

 A few years back, we began work in earnest on our DFAD recycling project in Seychelles.During the exploratory phase - we experimented with every high value use for the buoys...

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Brett, you may reach out to @Lucille, who under the auspices of the Partnership  for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO), the Scientific Committee of Ocean Research (SCOR), and the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE) is managing the development of LC-MARE a low cost marine acoustic recorder.  An ultra low power ADC is indeed an important component, so there may be some synergies.

This is really interesting — especially the part about experimenting with different high-value uses.

I’m currently working on a small edge AI project for ecosystem monitoring, and it’s made me realize how different things can look outside of controlled environments.

Out of curiosity, during those experiments, what ended up being the biggest constraint — was it more about technical feasibility, cost, or something unexpected in real-world conditions?

 

cool! 
When you say: "...first usable result that validates our hardware and software signal chain." can you share what those chains are? 

As for connectivity, yeah, that's a HUGE challenge ... Can you do SMS-level connectivity to Starlinks?

I presume you'd want to log basic temp/salinity, and perhaps include a basic accelerometer for wave motion over something like MQTT. 

As for pushing down bioacoustic processing to the devices, yeah, would be awesome to do some minimal envelope threshold detection, and just send back compressed versions of 'the good stuff' .  Maybe even listen for propellers and/or fishing sonar too, and send EarthRanger alerts.

And of course you'd want to do OTA updates, which in turn introduces security, etc.

Fun project!

 

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discussion

Using rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for AudioMoths and/or Swift's

Hi all, I'm wondering if anyone has experience using rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for passive acoustic devices, specifically Audiomoths (AA batteries) and Cornell...

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Hi Everyone,  

I have done some testing, and it seems like there is always some background noise from the switch, but it gets really loud once it echoes inside the Underwater case. 

 

 

Please find all tests and comparisons of the XTAR CLR 4300, the XTAR 4150 and the Energizer Ultimate Lithium

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Knbfk6A11YAdYtgn9k64ka7CU8tblw8-?usp=drive_link

Let me know if you have any suggestions and any extra tests to run.

The XTAR 4150mWh Capacity 2500mAh at the highest hydromoth settings runs only for 54 hours, which is not particularly impressive. 

I also emailed XTAR for advice. 

 

The XTAR CLR 4300 (2700mAh) lasted for 5 days and they still had power left, but they showed the same problem. 

I have not heard back from XTAR.

Any suggestions?

I added the files in the Gdrive folder above.

 

 

At this point, I would suggest:
- crosscheck with Alkaline Batteries (same sampling frequencies, same procedure)
- change sampling frequency to see if the pulse repetition frequency changes also or remains constant

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discussion

Looking for opportunities in AI for Bioacoustics and Environmental Monitoring

Hi everyone,My name is Leonardo Mannini, and I’m an AI engineer with a strong interest in bioacoustics and conservation technology.I recently completed a research role at FBK (...

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Hi Leonardo,


Let’s chat! I potentially have some opportunities, collaborations or even short-term employment. Send me a message. 

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discussion

What are the best Open-Source AI models for BioAcoustics?

Hello! I'm very behind in the state of the art of Bioacoustics. So I wanted to ask what are the models that people and organizations are using? I'm looking for useful models...

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Hi José,

BirdNET is one of the most common ones! The model is open, or there are also no-code interfaces that you can use as well.

Perch is another one (from Google hDeepMind) - good article about it too here.

The OpenSoundscape python package is also great for training your own CNNs.

Hi Jose,

The links that Carly posted are great resources. Just adding a couple other no-coding-required options to this discussion:

PAMGuard is good for marine bioacoustic classification. It has classifiers already for many species that produce whistles and clicks. It can also be used to create custom classifiers. The program can have a steep learning curve so keep that in mind.

Arbimon is a cloud-based tool for data storage and bioacoustic classification. It has some existing classification models and can be used to create custom ones.

BirdNET Analyzer uses the BirdNET model with an easy to use GUI. Can be used as is or allows for custom classifiers using transfer learning from original BirdNET embeddings.

Cheers,

Jesse

Hi Jose,

You might be interested in BriteKit, which helps you build bioacoustic recognizers using deep learning. 

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discussion

Data in the Data

Hi All - I gave a talk recently on northern leopard frogs, and in the following discussions, it turned out that some colleagues with ARUs deployed for birds have been getting...

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I recently was at the Los Amigos station, and just for fun turned on my Audiomoth at high frequency (~100khz) and got some crazy frog chorus recordings (along with bats and insects, etc) at a mosquito-infested pond in the Amazon. I too am indeed am looking for where to begin...

Thanks folks

As I think about this more. I wonder how many ARUs also collect temperature data, as if I remember correctly, this modulates insects (crickets and grasshoppers), and maybe some frog calls (grey tree frogs in my area). We just ordered a couple ARUs but I dont think that temperature is recorded so I will need to zip tie a temp logger to it when we deploy them. Does anyone know if this is an issue that others have encountered? 

Cheers

Stephen

Hi Stephen, you should connect with the acoustic team at WildTrax (environmental sensor data management platform used across Canada)! They can definitely answer both of those questions. You could search the Data Discover portal (on WildTrax - https://portal.wildtrax.ca/discover) to see who has ARU recordings that might interest you. There is lots of open data on WildTrax.

You can also use tools like HawkEars to scan ARU recordings for hundreds of Canadian species, including amphibians (HawkEars is embedded in WildTrax, too): https://github.com/jhuus/HawkEars

Hope this is helpful!

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discussion

Spectrolipi - A tool for sound data annotation.

Hello everyone,I’m Nishant. We have released a tool called Spectrolipi (https://spectrolipi.com) — for visualizing sound, annotating spectrograms...

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Hi Kristoffer,

I have tested upto 20 mins long sound files (48kHz /24 bit). It works without any significant lag on a normal office type machine (without dedicated GPU, etc). If required, I can try to provide a paging option which may be able to accomodate longer files.
Can you please inform the expected length of the sound files for your project.  

Regards,

Nishant

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discussion

New FishSounds Website Update!

🔉 Major FishSounds Website Update!!The beta version of the new FishSounds.net is live now and will be finalized over the next month. Most of the updates won’t necessarily be...

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Greetings Audrey, it is interesting to see to the project you are working on.  If there's anything I can do to help with my skillset let me know.

Thanks, Mike

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discussion

Kenyan Community-Led Mangrove Bioacoustics: Looking for Tips & Collaborators

Hi all! I’m Nurfatin Hamzah (Fatin), Community Manager at GainForest.Earlier this year, I visited our community partner in Kenya, Community Based Environmental Conservation (COBEC...

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Hi Fatin,

this sounds very interesting. I am an AI engineer and I just finished a job where i developed an AI model for audio classification and deployed it on an AudioMoth. Please let me know if you are interested in any kind of help or collaboration!

Leonardo

Greetings Nurfatin, it is interesting to see to the project you are working on.  If there's anything I can do to help with my skillset let me know.

Thanks, Mike

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discussion

Transfer learning with BirdNet for avian and non-avian detections

Who here has trained BirdNet to enable sound detection of other avian and non-avian species? I'd love to hear from you and would be grateful if you could share details about your...

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Hi, I am trying to identify caimans' sounds. A friend of mine is trying to identify primates' sounds in South America.

Hi Danielle,

 

I haven’t trained BirdNET directly, but I recently worked on a multi-species bird classification project using custom labeled datasets.

 

In our workflow we trained lightweight models using data augmentation and knowledge distillation from larger models, with the goal of making the system suitable for deployment on low-power devices like AudioMoth.

 

I’d be very interested to hear about others’ experiences adapting BirdNET to new taxa, especially bats or insects.

Just now seeing this - so apologies for the late reply! We studied multiple different bioacoustics embedding models (including BirdNet v2.3) for transfer learning performance for underwater and marine mammal tasks. The BirdNet version we examined had solid performance alongside Perch 1.0 and 2.0 models on the tasks we evaluated  (see: paper - Perch 2.0 transfers 'whale' to underwater tasks and blog post for more details). For example code - we have this end-to-end colab demo for an agile modeling workflow to create custom classifiers where there are multiple embedding model options to choose from (including BirdNet). Hope this helps!

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discussion

Safe and Sound project report: Is Camtrap DP a suitable standard for (bio)acoustic data?

Dear WILDLABS community,We are pleased to share with you the publication of the Safe and Sound project report: Is Camtrap DP a suitable...

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Your report on extending Camtrap DP to bioacoustics resonated with something we are just beginning to explore in Mindoro Island, Philippines.

We have ongoing camera trap deployments in interior forest habitats and are beginning to examine the acoustic layer embedded in those recordings, particularly for nocturnal species such as the Mindoro Boobook. The discussion around terminology and how datasets are structured feels especially relevant, though I am still trying to understand how frameworks like Camtrap DP would apply in practice to this kind of data.

It is encouraging to see this direction being shaped at the community level. I will be following this closely as we continue to learn and figure out how our own datasets might eventually align.

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