sound library

The BARN project develops openly-available software tools to support the creation and maintenance of networked annotated sound libraries. Our goal is to accelerate progress and collaboration in bioacoustics research through the creation of tools that allow authoring, consumption, and sharing of persistently accessible and richly annotated sound collections. Through a BARN server users and groups can maintain web-based sound collections along with extensible recording metadata, organize these into projects to focus annotation efforts, richly and accurately annotate sound with extensible computer-assistance and human review, and use BARN data feeds and export formats to integrate various tools in support of a desired workflow. BARN stored data may be private, shared in a limited way with other BARN users, or widely published to the world. The BARN architecture offers simple programmatic access to BARN data through a REST application programming interface (API) as well as mechanisms for distributed data storage and computer-assisted annotation. The BARN API realizes the openness afforded by the network environment and allows users and developers to access and update resources using HTTP capable software and programming languages. Using this approach users and developers can create simple scripts as well as full applications that read and write BARN data. BARN store data can thus be authored and reused by any number of software tools through the REST API, lowering the cost of integration, interoperability, communication, and collaboration. Federation mechanisms for storage and computation make BARN scalable. Large sound collections maybe maintained in a distributed manner through the easy maintenance of any number of associated BARN file servers, and large-scale computer-assisted annotation supports a distributed-computing model that allows a similar scalability of computation.

The British Library Sound Archive has one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of bioacoustic sound recordings. Founded in 1969, the collection now contains more than 160,000 recordings of wildlife and natural soundscape recordings, many of which have never been published. The wildlife collection was originally formed to serve as an international resource for bioacoustics research, providing copies of recordings to researchers and archiving field recordings for future generations to benefit from. Today recordings are also provided for educational projects, exhibitions, private listening, artistic sound installations, musical compositions, broadcasting and commercial publications. SoundServer is an automated service that offers immediate onsite access to a growing number of recordings. Visitors to the British Library’s Reading Rooms can either browse the Sound Archive collections via the Jukebox service or pre-order a personal playlist according to their specific needs. Remote access is available through the Archival Sound Recordings (ASR) website. ASR is an online resource that provides access to thousands of hours of recordings from across the Sound Archive. Three wildlife content packages are currently available through this resource – British Wildlife Recordings, Natural Soundscapes and Amphibians.

Part of the British Library, the National Sound Archive (NSA) in London is one of the largest sound archives in the world. The NSA Wildlife Section contains important collections of the sound recordings of animals. To date, more than 9,000 species of birds, mammals, insects, amphibians and other animals from most countries of the world are represented in this unique resource. The recordings are backed up with detailed documentation and nearly all are of animals in the wild. The recordings are available or research and educational uses. In addition, the NSA Wildlife Section provides information about other recordings, and about equipment and techniques for recording and analysis.

The National Sound Archive Wildlife Section (previously known as BLOWS) is a vital resource for bioacoustics researchers, taxonomists, naturalists, teachers and the media, with recordings of over 8,000 species of birds and other animals worldwide. Every year c.3,000 recordings are donated by scores of recordists, although there is still a need to make the collections yet more comprehensive: 15% of the world's bird species are not represented in any archives or private sound collections. Listening, information, copying and sonograph services are available for researchers, as well as the journal Bioacoustics. The Archive is currently upgrading its facilities through a programme of researching permanent digital carriers and computerising all catalogue data. The long-term aim is to provide remote on-line access to the collections throughout Europe.

The animal sound archive of the Humboldt University of Berlin is one of the oldest and largest bioacoustic collections in Europe. It was founded in October 1951 by Gunther Tembrock. Now it contains around 300,000 cuts. 580 species of mammals, 1800 species of birds, and some reptiles, amphibians, fishes and arthropods are represented. The collection includes recordings made in the field and in zoological gardens. Most of the field recordings are from Germany. In addition there are original recordings from Poland, the Caucasian region, Karelia, Mongolia, North America, Africa and the Antarctic. The archive has always been the base for scientific research in the field of acoustic communication of animals. Therefore, most of the recordings are well documented as to the behaviour during vocalizations. In the last few years we have started to catalogue the recordings, using a data base system. In this way the recordings of the last three years have been registered. Nearly all recordings are on ¼ inch tapes. In the future we intend to transform the recordings to optical discs.  More than 100 Masters or Ph.D. theses have been based on recordings from the sound archive, which is available for all scientists working on acoustic behaviour of animals.

The British Library of Wildlife Sounds (BLOWS) collects and preserves recordings of all kinds of animal sounds for research and education. Established in 1969, it has the foremost collection of its kind in Europe, with recordings of 7,000 species of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects. The collection is worldwide in scope but is particularly strong on the fauna of western Europe. Many recordings are accompanied by detailed behavioural notes and they are invaluable in ethological and taxonomic research. By agreement with contributors, copies of most recordings and sonograms can be supplied for research. BLOWS also gives advice on recording techniques and on the availability of recordings worldwide, and maintains strong links with other major bioacoustic archives. Thanks to the generosity of many contributing recordists and scientists, BLOWS collections are expanding rapidly, but more recordists are urged to deposit copies or their original recordings for safe storage and to make them more widely available to the scientific community.

Field studies on cetaceans in the Mediterranean Sea have experienced a remarkable development in recent years. Research cruises aboard sailing vessels up to 19 m long were organized by Tethys Research Institute within the seas bordering the Italian peninsula and islands. From 1987 to 1990 recordings of underwater sounds produced by cetaceans in these waters were collected. Recordings were made with traditional reel-to-reel analog tape recorders and high quality underwater transducers. A total of about eight hours of underwater sounds of six odontocete and one mysticete species were recorded. These sounds were subsequently analyzed. The analysis of basic parameters such as duration and frequency range was performed on a Kay Sonagraph DSP 5500 at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioacoustic Research of the University of Pavia. A cetacean sound library catalogue based on a commercial database was created in order to allow interaction with a PC-based DSP workstation equipped with optical disk for storage of digitized sounds. The aim of this sound library is to provide more information about the acoustic capabilities of cetaceans of the Mediterranean and to allow highly specific access to available data for a variety of potential future applications, such as research and didactical purposes. A current joint research program between Tethys Research Institute and the Center for Bioacoustic Research should provide further opportunities to increase the collected and analyzed data of this library. This research is supported by grants from the Italian Ministero della Marina Mercantile.

Collections of animal sound recordings serve many uses in education, entertainment, science and nature conservation. The first animal sound recording dates from as early as 1889, although systematic collecting did not begin until the 1950s. The largest collections between them now hold around 0.5 million recordings with their associated data. They preserve the sounds of all kinds or animals with multiple examples of their seasonal, geographical and individual variations. For example, the British Library National Sound Archive (NSA) has 140,000 recordings of more than 10,000 species of birds, mammals, insects and amphibians, donated by numerous individual scientists and amateur recordists worldwide. Preserving such large collections for the long term is a primary concern in the digital age. While digitisation and digital preservation have many advantages over analogue methods, the rate of technology change and lack of standardisation is a serious problem for the world's major audio archives. Techniques to reduce the risk of obsolescence include technology preservation, migration or emulation. Another challenge is to make collections more easily and widely accessible via electronic networks. On-line catalogues are already available for some collections (NSA collection: www.cadensa.bl.uk ; Borror collection: blb.biosci.ohio-state.edu/). Providing internet access to the actual audio is the next goal although because currently the data rate of most internet connections is slow compared to CD quality audio rates of 706 kbps, on-line recordings are short, low-quality clips of the archival versions.

The "Centro Interdisciplinare di Bioacustica e Ricerche Ambientali'' was founded in 1988 by the University of Pavia. Since 1989 it is endowed with a Laboratory of Marine Bioacoustics granted by the "lspettorato Centrale per la Difesa del Mare'' of the Italian Ministry of the Environment. The Cetacean Sound Library created at the Centro holds recordings made in research cruises organised to study the acoustic behaviour, distribution and biology of cetaceans in the Mediterranean Sea. More than 130 hours of recordings belong to Sperm whales (which till now has been the target species), Striped dolphins, Risso's dolphins, Bottlenose dolphins, Common dolphins, Pilot whales, and other sound sources including man-made noises. A catalogue based on a widely used database format was created in order to allow an easy and reliable access to the collected recordings and to related data such as digitised photographs of individual Sperm whales, video clips, behavioural observations, cruise tracks, bathymetric data, and others. In the last two years a useful partnership with the Italian Navy has been arranged, and the Centro is asked to evaluate biological sounds recorded in ASW (Anti Submarine Warfare) operations and surveys.

In anti-submarine warfare (ASW), sound is the foremost mechanism for the detection of potential threats. To detect a potential enemy underwater the sonar operator must be familiar not only with the acoustic signatures of the threats, but also with the many and varied noises from non-threat sources in the ocean. Some of the most prolific of these sources are biological. SANDS is a research tool aimed primarily at providing a reference set of biological noises for training purposes. As well as examples of the sounds, it contains stills and movies for species identification purposes. It also includes diagrams and textual information for each species on particular subjects at different levels of detail. Facilities are provided to search for specific species and examples on various criteria. Over 6,500 digitised sound examples, covering 34 species, have been collated through research organisations in America and Europe. These are stored as digitised time-series files, along with associated textual information. While the system has been designed primarily to support aural training, it has application to many other areas of research. It is probably the most comprehensive database of its kind in the United Kingdom, possibly in Europe.