Hi

Take a look at this discussion. 

https://www.researchgate.net/post/software_for_analyze_frog_sounds

Sincerely

Claes

Hello,

You could use the R packages seewave, tuneR, soundecology and ineq (https://www.r-project.org/). “R” is free and useful in many ways. Plus, there are numerus articles using these R packages for bioacoustic and ecoacoustic research.   

Nevertheless, for a more basic and user friendly approach, you could use Audacity (http://www.audacityteam.org/).    

Best regards,

Aggelos

Pachyderm (a plugin for Rhino and Grasshopper) is a good start for student and it's free. 

Hi

And, of course, there are nowadays good and useful apps on smartphones that can make spectrum, octaves and spectrograms using the microphone. There is also an app that can strobe flashlight/screen to allow old school troubleshooting of vibration patterns.

A classroom can go a long way with such equipment. 

Last but not least, you find some old but good self study material from B&K and HP here

http://qringtech.com/learnmore/recommended-reading/

along with some ramblings of mine on measurements here

http://qringtech.com/measurement-from-diy-to-pro/

/Claes

Hi, I do not know about the specific requirements you might have reagarding the underwater use, but I think the most used and the most user friendly products are Raven Pro or Avisoft SASLab Pro (terrestrial birds and mammals). Both have free versions but very limited functions compared to full versions. Free alternatives, not so user friendly in all aspects, but with some possibilities not available in two mentioned above could be>

PRAAT - http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

Luscinia - http://rflachlan.github.io/Luscinia/

or R packages (see earlier answers)

best, Pavel

I cut my teeth on Matlab software written by my lab, and I have to say that when I tried to use Raven Pro a few years later it was very confusing. Maybe that was just a learning curve issue, though.

One follow up question--are you looking for user friendly in the sense of "letting students understand how the measurements they're taking work" or in the sense of "it's easy for a complete neophyte to be given a bunch of data and turn it into measurements that can be analyzed later?" Because Matlab is probably worse for the second but better for the first, IME. 

Depending on the kind of underwater sounds you are going to analyze, I can recommend Raven Pro for dolphin and whale vocalizations. However, the Pro-version is not for free and can be obtained from the Cornell Lab. As Pavel recommended, I recently also used Avisoft. If you simply would like to visualize sounds, I sometimes use Audacity which is freely available. However, for Audacity the sampling frequency is limited to vocalizations

I used Audacity, because it is a multiplatform, free and very simple software. I wrote a document (in french) which proposes many activities around signal processing :

http://www.impmc.jussieu.fr/%7Eayrinhac/documents/Traitement_du_Signal_avec_Audacity.pdf

I used Matlab (or Scilab) firstly, and lot of students wasted their time in coding.

Thanks everybody for your insights, very useful. This will be quite a short course so I did not want to 'waste' too much time with teaching the students how to code, although I agree that it is probably one of best thing to understand the signal analysis. At the undergrad level and with only a few hours to get around it, I reckon something like Raven Pro or Avisoft will do the job!

I am new to acoustics and i have a question too.

I recorded terrestrial sounds continuously for 3 days in a test site. The recording quality is very good.

I wish to analyses the sounds and develop an index for biodiversity based on the recorded sounds.

I wish to compare this with recordings i will make in the next few years and be able to see the changes.

can you please suggest a way forward including a suitable software for analysis.

Thanks a lot

Hi Shekhar,

There are several good references describing how to use recordings (often of birds) to calculate the Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI) and other metrics that can serve to reflect acoustic biodiversity. Some that I have found useful are:

1. Buxton, R. T., Agnihotri, S., Robin, V. V., Goel, A., and Balakrishnan, R. Acoustic indices as rapid indicators of avian diversity in different land-use types in an Indian biodiversity hotspot. Journal of Ecoacoustics. 2018; 2:#GWPZVD. https://doi.org/10.22261/JEA.GWPZVD.

2. Moreno-Gómez, F. N., Bartheld, J., Silva-Escobar, A. A., Briones, R., Márquez, R., and Penna, M. Evaluating acoustic indices in the Valdivian rainforest, a biodiversity hotspot in South America. Ecological Indicators. 2019; 103(2019), 1-8.

3. Sueur, J., Pavoine, S., Hamerlynck, O., and Duvail, S. Rapid acoustic survey for biodiversity appraisal. PLoS ONE. 2008; 3(12):e4065. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004065.

Hope this helps-

Peter

Thanks peter,

I will go through the references and get back.

any tips of software that can help me with my data?