Comprehensive Web-Based Library of Marine Biological Sounds

摘要

This project funded the creation of the world's largest online reference collection of marine animal sounds at the Macaulay Library (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). Over a 6 year period, 5700 audio clips (1200 hours) of marine mammal and fish sound recordings were digitized, documented in an extensive metadata base, and made available for free online playback. Users can search the collection using a variety of criteria and either play back the clips directly, or alternatively play them back while watching customizable and real-time waveforms, spectrograms, and power spectra. Usage of the collection has grown 7-fold in the last two years and serves the needs of researchers, military staff, educators, K-12 and college students, conservation and wildlife programs, the arts, museums, zoos, and aquaria, publishers, nature outreach industries, and both public and commercial media. A suite of 30 standardized sound measures were developed during the project and are now being tested for robustness as features extractable from annotated clips in the collection. Extracted features will be used as additional search criteria, data for automatic species identification, and ecological comparisons of sound communication in diverse habitats.