Bit Depth or the Shortest Post Ever

Hi All,
Most everyone who might stumble across this blog is familiar with sample frequency (fs) and how it relates to documenting sounds of interest (cliff notes version: sample frequency should be at least twice the target frequency of your study critter's calls/vocalizations).

But what does bit depth refer to? If you've stumbled across the Matlab commands waveread() or adudioread() you would (or should) know that there are multiple outputs including "nbits". N bits most simply means the bit depth of the audio file. What? Is that not helpful? Fine, let me 'splain.

Bit depth refers to the resolution of the amplitude of the sound. So if you need to carefully monitor fluctuations in amplitude levels, you will need a higher bit depth. Thankfully, this doesn't tend to be an issue for most bioacoustic studies. So, unless otherwise noted, just stick with the system defaults and you'll be all set. Hope that helps and let me know if you are doing something that requires high amplitude resolution. I'm super keen to learn about it!

Write, back to the thesis...

Happy recording to you!

SMM 2015

Welcome to my 2015 Marine Mammal Biennial page.  This page contains explanations of some of the work from the poster presented at the 21st Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals. I've added some extra material here pertaining to the extraordinarily geeky components of my poster that wouldn't fit in the allotted space as well as some of the future directions the research will take.

You Might Be A Marine Mammal Scientist If....

Hi All [three of you]. I’ve been a horrible slacker lately and not updated anything. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been working on a fairly cool project that’s almost ready for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, just waiting for my advisers to get some feedback to me… Once that's ready I look forward to sharing it here. In the meantime I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a marine mammal scientists, which I guess I should classify myself as since I’ve been unsuccessful in procuring gainful employment with any other species.

Personally, I’ve been interested in whales since I was a kid and have been privileged enough to have been born into a family that both pushed me in school and helped me, to the best of their abilities, pay for university. I’ve also been fortunate enough to have been supported by some great schools along the and by even better mentors (to whom I’m eternally grateful to). Anyway, for the last (eherm) 13 odd years I’ve been studying or working in the marine mammal field almost exclusively. Over that time I’ve noticed some interesting “particularities” and, dare I say it, bias among the marine mammal researchers. Some of these quirks are quite entertaining and others considerably less so. I’ve compiled them in a list of Jeff Foxworthy-esque statements. I hope you enjoy.

You might be a marine mammal biologist if:

If you’ve been reminded not to discuss whale necropsies at the dinner table.