Bioacoustics

Background to some bioacoustics ideas and principles

• Mosaic of the air How the acoustic space can be partitioned.

• Out of intense complexities… individuals and indices Balancing scope, scale and speed as the fundamental limits of what a network is capable of.

• Nature is never silent? Is nature actually noisy?

Bioacoustics history

• History of Bioacoustics

• History of Bioacoustics at the Natural History Museum, London

Bioacoustics pioneers

• G. W. Pierce Physicist who made his own devices to study the songs of Orthoptera, started the misuse of the word pulse, and made early hydrophones.

Publications

• Bioacoustic and Ecoacoustic Data in Audiovisual Core (2024) Biodiversity Information Science and Standards

• Realising the potential for acoustic monitoring to address environmental policy needs (2022) JNCC Report No. 707

• Reviving the sound of a 150-year-old insect: The bioacoustics of Prophalangopsis obscura (Ensifera: Hagloidea) (2022) PLOS ONE

• Bioacoustics and systematics of Mecopoda (and related forms) from South East Asia and adjacent areas (2021) Zootaxa

• Standardisation of bioacoustic terminology for insects (2020) Biodiversity Data Journal

• A deafening silence: a lack of data and reproducibility in published bioacoustics research? (2019) Biodiversity Data Journal

• From an old sound recording to a new species in the genus Horatosphaga (2017) Zootaxa

• Global Cicada Sound Collection I: Recordings from South Africa and Malawi by B. W. Price & M. H. Villet and harvesting of BioAcoustica data by GBIF (2015) Biodiversity Data Journal

• Natural History Museum Sound Archive I: Orthoptera: Gryllotalpidae Leach, 1815, including 3D scans of burrow casts of Gryllotalpa gryllotalpa Linnaeus, 1758 (2015) Biodiversity Data Journal

• Speckled Bush Cricket Data Logger - Project Report (2015) figshare

• BioAcoustica: a free and open repository and analysis platform for bioacoustics (2015) Database

Tools

sonicscrewdriver

Sonicscrewdriver is an R package that provides a set of tools for working with audio data.

• Reading any type of audio file into R The sonicscrewdriver package provides a simple way to read audio files of any type into R (the most commonly used tools only deal with .wav and .mp3 files).

• Generating acoustic training data in R with sonicscrewdriver - how to generate augmneted training data for machine learning from audio files.

• BirdNET in R - running BirdNET from within an R environment.

ReVAMP

ReVAMP - R wrapper for VAMP audio analysis plugins.

.wav file size calculator

.wav file size calculator: interactive wave file sizer calculator.

Bioacoustic collections

BioAcoustica - a repository for bioacoustic recordings I developed hosted at the Natural History Museum, London.

The Importance of Biological Sound Archives - Acoustics Today article by Jack Greenhalgh with some quotes from me on the importance of sound collections. PDF

audioBlast! - protoytpe tool to search across multiple sound collections.

Relevant blog posts

• Announcing ReVAMP: Bringing Vamp Audio Analysis Plugins to R (2025-12-23)
• Introductory bioacoustics course (2025-09-19)

Press stories

• Insect Orchestra article for NHM website.

• Noisy neighbours: Listening in to nature in cities and towns Introduction to my research as part of the Urban Nature Project.