Natural sound archives: past, present and future

Abstract

Recordings of wild animals were first made in the Palearctic in 1900, in the Nearctic in 1929, in Antarctica in 1934, in Asia in 1937, and in the Neotropics in the 1940s. However, systematic collecting did not begin until the 1950s. Collections of animal sound recordings serve many uses in education, entertainment, science and nature conservation. In recent years, technological developments have transformed the ways in which sounds can be sampled, stored and accessed. Now the largest collections between them hold altogether around 0.5 million recordings with their associated data. The functioning of a major archive will be described with reference to the British Library Sound Archive. Preserving large collections for the long term is a primary concern in the digital age. While digitization and digital preservation has many advantages over analogue methods, the rate of technology change and lack of standardization are a serious problem for the world's major audio archives. Another challenge is to make collections more easily and widely accessible via electronic networks. On-line catalogues and access to the actual sounds via the internet are already available for some collections. Case studies describing the establishment and functioning of sound libraries in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil are given in individually authored sections in an Appendix.

The use of bioacoustics in anuran taxonomy: theory, terminology, methods and recommendations for best practice

“…Since the rise of appropriate mechanical devices, biologists have increasingly recorded and documented sounds from nature (see Ranft 2004 for a review). Sound recordings per se have a high scientific value yet most of them are not made available along with call descriptions, and are not appropriately archived.…”

“…Recordings that are not housed in institutions or sound archives are at high risk of loss by material degradation or misplacement . As a consequence, efforts are being undertaken to meet the challenge of preserving, storing and managing audio and video recordings for subsequent generations of scientists, and making these data accessible to the public, via scientific institutions, sound archives and repositories (Ranft 2004;Obrist et al 2010;Cugler et al 2011;Marques & Auraújo 2014;Toledo et al 2015b).…”

“…Sound archives are important repositories of worldwide biodiversity (Ranft 2004;Toledo et al 2015b), but depositing sound files in accessible collections is yet to become a universal practice (Toledo et al 2015b). Given the importance of bioacoustics in frog taxonomy, it would much facilitate taxonomic work if all described calls were already deposited in sound archives.…”

Teaching with the Macaulay Library: An Online Archive of Animal Behavior Recordings

“…Such recordings are freely available online in the Macaulay Library (http://macaulaylibrary. org), the world's largest scientifically curated archive of natural history media (3,6). Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Macaulay Library currently houses about 50,000 video clips and 123,300 audio recordings (including the sounds of 75 percent of the world's bird species, and recordings dating back to 1929).…”

Similarity Search in Animal Sound Databases

“…D URING the last years, animal sound archives (such as the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, the British Library Sound Archive, and the Animal Sound Archive in Berlin) have started to put large efforts into the digitization of their analogue audio material [1]. These efforts, which have been mainly started for conservation reasons, also simplify access to recordings and make them accessible for algorithmic processing and analysis.…”