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Methods

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Soundscape Ecology

Abstract

Sound is a complex phenomenon that copies the environmental characteristics of the context in which is generated. For this reason, many descriptors are required to approach the behavior of sound and its effects on physical and biological objects. Frequency, pitch, period, wavelength, sound speed, wavenumber, amplitude, sound pressure, sound power, sound intensity, and loudness are some of the distinctive parameters used to describe a sound.

A sound pressure measurement and a spectral-frequency analysis are the two distinct approaches adopted today to collect information on the sonic environment.

Field recording now offers a great variety of recording devices that can sample at different rates and in different types of digital memories. Single microphones, sets of adjacent microphones, and regular arrays of microphones are some possibilities for collecting sound data from the environment.

Spectral analysis, which is central in bioacoustics research, offers some metrics to evaluate the complexity of the sonic environment: acoustic entropy index, median of amplitude envelope, acoustic richness, acoustic dissimilarity index, acoustic complexity index. These metrics capture the emerging patterns of a sonic environment and allow characterizing the soundscape in delimited areas of interest.

The popularity of automated digital field recording devices allows storing a great amount of data that urgently requires an easy browsing approach to consolidate sound computing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Basic Sciences and Foundations, Urbino University, Urbino, Pesaro-Urbino, Italy

    Almo Farina

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  1. Almo Farina
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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Farina, A. (2014). Methods. In: Soundscape Ecology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7374-5_9

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