My Favorite Things

While waiting for PAMGuard to run on an exceptionally large file, I thought I might post some cool websites.

Animal Sounds! 

British Sound Library Archive- Listen to sounds collected from animals throughout the UK. Unfortunately, they are currently lacking marine mammal examples. Oh well, no ones perfect.

Macaulay Library- "World's largest archive of wildlife sound and videos". Nuff' said.

Discovery of Sound in the Sea (DOSITS)- Extensive library of marine mammal sounds as well as basic outlines of many topics in bioacoustics (noise pollution, sound propagation, careers etc.) This is one of my personal favorites to send interested high school students to.

Voices of the Sea- Includes many sounds recorded by researchers at Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

Mobysound-Lots of marine mammal sounds.

Cool Science!

The Waveform Diary- A science blog to put all science blogs to shame. Produced by the amazing artist and scientist Michelle Wray from University of Washington.

Southern Fried Science-Debunking fake science and highlighting amazing goings on in the marine science world. For any of you who have the (mis)fortune to know me personally, fake science and mixing science and religion is one of my biggest pet peeves. These guys (shark researchers!) do a great job of separating the chaff.

Science of Sound- Basics of the physics of sound.

Acoustics Animations- Animations of more complicated sound and vibration principles via Dan Russell of Penn State acoustics department (my Alma mater)

(Mostly) Free Sound Apps

Wildlife Acoustics- they produce a wide variety of hardware and software for recording animal sounds and the ambient noise. Now they have a Bat app for iPhone which allows users to see visual representations of bat echolocations as they fly overhead. Sadly, not free.

Raven Lite- Record sounds from the microphone on your computer or upload previously recorded sounds and play with different spectrogram settings. Advanced version (Raven Pro) is commonly used by researchers to do advanced sound analysis.

Spectral View- Free app for android. I have no experience with this, so download at your own risk.

Audacity- Primarily for music editing, but free and great for playing with distortion effects.

PAMGuard- Powerful software for passive acoustic monitoring.

Reference Books

Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Cetaceans- one of my all time favorites because Dr. Zimmer includes all of the code to make the figures and do the processes in his book. Now if only he would make his website easier to find...

Fundamentals of Acoustics- I used this book extensively in my master's degree. Perfect if you have a strong background in math and physics. For the obligate biologist, better pass on this one. 

Principles of Marine Bioacoustics- I've talked about this one before. Covers everything, great gift for the marine bioacoustician in your life.

Sanity Check

XKCD

PhD Comics