Soundscapes

A soundscape is a collection of all the sounds in a particular environment. This includes the biophony (sounds produced by animals), geophony (sounds originating from weather and geophysical forces), and anthrophony (sounds made by humans). Soundscapes are useful tools for looking at changes in biodiversity over long periods of time, but they can also provide insight into the ecological interactions among species and between the environment and species.

My research incorporates soundscape technology to understand how noise is structured on a typical breeding night for frogs and how it could affect female choices of which males to mate with on a given night. Passive recorders are also a noninvasive approach to studying acoustic communities.

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One method for visualizing soundscapes is the use of long-duration, false-color spectrograms (developed by scientists at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia), which plot acoustic indicators on a frequency by time axis. These spectrograms allow for rapid visualization and interpretation of long-duration recordings, as shown below in a 6 hour recording of a night chorus.