Progress 10/01/07 to 09/30/08
Outputs
OUTPUTS: The Macaulay Library Marine Collection now has over 5200 recordings of 69 species of marine mammals and 527 recordings of fish available online. The fish collection represents 45 fish families, 93 genera, and 143 species. Over 96% of the fish recordings are from the eastern coast of North America, Bermuda, or the Caribbean. Only 1% are sounds of fish from North America's Pacific coast, an area for which we are currently recruiting recordings actively. The Macaulay Library began a parallel archive of videos of animal behavior in 2003, and currently has over 38,000 video clips online. Many are in high definition formats. Most are of terrestrial species, but the Library has recently acquired a large set of video recordings of marine animals that will be archived in 2009. Finally, the Library acquired over 1200 tapes of marine mammal sounds collected and annotated by Dr. Roger Payne and the Ocean Alliance organization. These tapes include the most historically and geographically comprehensive recordings of humpback whale songs in existence. This set of recordings will be known as the Roger Payne Marine Collection and made available both through the Macaulay Library websites and the Biomusic Program and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Finally, as part of a complete revision of the Macaulay Library website, a new marine portal aimed at the lay public was created with sample audio and video clips from the marine collections, information on how marine animals use sounds, the potential uses of the marine archive, and links directly into the search and visualization tools for the Library. PARTICIPANTS: Dr. Jack W. Bradbury (PI and Director, The Macaulay Library): oversaw design of project; Greg Budney (Curator of the Audio Collection, The Macaulay Library): oversaw execution of marine archival project; Ashik Rahaman (Audio Archivist, The Macaulay Library): primary archivist for marine project; William McQuay (Audio Engineer, Macaulay Library): maintains archival equipment and resolves archival problems; Dr. Edwin Scholes (Curator of the Video Collection, The Macaulay Library): oversaw recruitment and archival of video recordings of marine animals; David O. Brown (Videographer, Multimedia Unit, Cornell Lab of Ornithology): collects video footage on marine animals in the wild and provides consultations on marine collection; Brian Maltzan (Lead Programmer, The Macaulay Library): oversees software for online access to archive; Tim Levatich (Database Manager, The Macaulay Library): maintains and updates metadata associated with Macaulay Library assets. TARGET AUDIENCES: The Macaulay Library's assets are used by a wide variety of audiences including scientific researchers in biology, oceanography, physiology, psychology, and physics; public science institutions such as museums, zoos, and aquaria; educators and students at both K-12 and college levels; wildlife management and conservation staff; national park facilities that provide sample sounds and videos of local wildlife; public and commercial radio and television; the movie industry; various toy industries; book publishers especially those including sounds in book products; the online music industry such as iTunes and similar sites; amateur naturalists; field recordists and videographers seeking updated reviews on field recording equipment. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
Online usage of the marine collection at the Macaulay Library continues to increase. Copies of video and audio recordings have been provided for a variety of public and commercial television and radio programs, video footage is being used in several science centers and museums, and clips demonstrating important examples of behaviors have been provided as collateral material for two recent textbooks on animal behavior. The acquisition of the Roger Payne Marine Collection will provide the Biomusic program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro with a rich source of materials for studies comparing human and marine animal sounds and the production of musical compositions mixing human and animal elements.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 10/01/06 to 09/30/07
Outputs
OUTPUTS: Current grant funding for this project is due to end in March 2008, This has led to a reduction in associated staff to one archivist. Despite this reduction in staffing, archival of contributed materials continued unabated this year. Recordings for several new species of pinnipeds and toothed whales were archived for the first time, and extensive depth has been achieved for others. The effort continues to identify a suite of acoustic features that can be extracted from all annotated segments of marine recordings, used for comparative studies, and provide standards for automatic species identifiers. Thirty candidate measures were designed in MatLab and posted on a website where anyone in the marine bioacoustic community can download and test them. This project is now sufficiently mature that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is actively seeking an endowment to ensure its continued growth and maintenance as part of the Macaulay Library.
PARTICIPANTS: Dr. Jack W. Bradbury (PI and Director, The Macaulay Library): oversaw design of project; Greg Budney (Curator of the Audio Collection, The Macaulay Library): oversaw execution of marine archival project; Ashik Rahaman (Audio Archivist, The Macaulay Library): primary archivist for marine project; William McQuay (Audio Engineer, Macaulay Library): maintains archival equipment and resolves archival problems; Brian Maltzan (Lead Programmer, The Macaulay Library): oversees software for online access to archive; Tim Levatich (Database Manager, The Macaulay Library): maintains and updates metadata associated with Macaulay Library assets.
Impacts
Online access to assets in the marine archive now number over 2500/month with rates continuing to climb. The collection is now seen as one of the major marine bioacoustics community resources, and the online tools for browsing and visualizing the sounds has received widespread approbation. Several major projects to design automatic identifiers of unknown marine sounds are now using Macaulay Library recordings for standard references. This is of great interest to scientists, conservation biologists, and the US Navy.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 01/01/06 to 12/31/06
Outputs
The marine collection continued to grow rapidly. Holdings now include over 4700 recordings and 1100 hours of marine animal sounds. Taxonomic coverage has increased to 83 percent of Mysticete species, 50 percent of Odontocete species, 60 percent of Pinniped species, and over 250 fish species. A large number of key contributions were negotiated including new material from Australia, the Canadian arctic, and the Pacific and extensive new recordings on baleen whale species. A set of proposed acoustic measures to be made on archived sounds was compiled and relevant algorithms written and posted on a website for testing by the marine bioacoustics community. After the official release of the online search and sound visualization software in August 2006, usage of the marine archive increased tenfold from 280 users/month in August to 2230 users/month in November. Macaulay Library staff participated in several key national and international meetings and workshops (ASA, NOAA,
Marine Mammal Society, Ocean Sciences, European Cetacean Society) that focused on marine animal ecology, conservation, and management. This provided opportunities for the Library to become a collaborative participant in a variety of new and ongoing marine animal projects.
Impacts
This collection will provide major resources for monitoring of endangered marine mammal populations, assays by geoexploration firms to avoid harassing wild populations, and a rich source of material for researchers, educators, the media, and commercial operations.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 01/01/05 to 12/31/05
Outputs
The marine animal sound archive project moved ahead rapidly this year. The total number of digitally archived recordings rose from 2005 totals by 65 percent to over 825 hours, and recordings for 10 additional marine mammals species were acquired and archived. The Macaulay Library began issuing a quarterly newsletter to the marine bioacoustics community to alert them to progress on the project, encourage new submissions of recordings, and invite discussion on how the Library can best serve the members of the community. In April, the new visualization tools providing spectrograms, waveforms, and playback went online and have gone through several upgrades to more powerful configurations since. At the same time, all of the digitized marine collection became available online for search and recovery, visualization and playback, map interactivity, and expert annotation. Major progress has been made in selecting and testing a set of extracted measurements on annotated
segments (features) that will become available for community input in Spring 2006. Members of the Library attended a series of national or international meetings to introduce the services and tools developed for the marine animal sound archive.
Impacts
This collection will provide major resources for monitoring of endangered marine mammal populations, assays by geoexploration firms to avoid harassing wild populations, and a rich source of material for researchers, educators, the media, and commercial operations.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 01/01/04 to 12/31/04
Outputs
The Office of Naval Research-funded project to build a centralized marine animal sound archive at the Macaulay Library has progressed significantly in the last year. Significant new contributions have been archived bringing the number of marine mammals represented to 56 species, the number of fish to 136, and the total hours of archived material to over 500 hours. One major effort this year was the design of annotation software that will allow remote experts to visualize any recording the archive and identify segments within it to which they can then attach detailed annotations. Searches for specific types of sounds can then go not only to relevant recordings, but to relevant parts of recordings. This facility is particularly necessary for marine recordings where there are long periods of silence between animal sounds and/or multiple species making sounds in the same recording. A second effort, ongoing, is the development of feature extraction software that will make
a suite of acoustic measurements on every annotated sound in the collection and make those measurements available for search and retrieval. This effort is currently being pursued in collaboration with members of the marine bioacoustics community to identify the most useful measurements and the best ways to make them. Initial steps were also taken to lay the groundwork for eventual federation of the Macaulay Library marine animal archive with complementary marine databases such as OBIS/SEAMAP.
Impacts
This collection will provide major resources for monitoring of endangered marine mammal populations, assays by geoexploration firms to avoid harassing wild populations, and a rich source of material for education and both public and commercial media.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 01/01/03 to 12/31/03
Outputs
This project is assembling and digitizing the last 3 decades of recordings of marine animals made first in North America but soon from throughout the world in a manner that will allow complex searches of the associated database, preview and browsing of different sounds, and provision of copies through the Internet. To date sounds of over 120 species of marine animal species have been archived digitally including all of the historical University of Rhode Island collections. This last year saw the initial designs for sophisticated feature extraction software that will eventually allow the identification of unknown marine sounds from remote locations. This last year also saw the final purchase, installation, and integration of the work stations and enterprise storage required to house and distribute this vast collection over the Internet.
Impacts
This collection will provide major resources for monitoring of endangered marine mammal populations, assays by geoexploration firms to avoid harassing wild populations, and a rich source of material for education and both public and commercial media.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 01/01/02 to 12/31/02
Outputs
This project seeks to create a centralized digital archive of the many thousands of marine animal sound recordings made in North America during the last 3-4 decades, and to make the digital copies available over the Internet. The source recordings are currently scattered across several hundred institutions and many are poorly housed in deteriorating conditions. Following a continent-wide survey of locations, amounts, condition, species content, and availability of materials, Office of Naval Research and a DURIP awards have enabled the Macaulay Library to begin the major task of archiving, organizing, and distributing these materials. In the first 9 months of the awards, over 120 hours of original recordings have been archived including material from 100 species of fish and 24 species of marine mammals along with the associated metadata. The project is also currently developing relevant Internet search and access software for the collection, and will subsequently
develop a suite of analytical tools that can be used online to identify, compare, annotate, and measure large sets of digitized marine animal sounds.
Impacts
This project involves the creation of a centralized digital library of marine animal sounds at the Macaulay Library (Cornell University) that would be remotely accessible for research, conservation, management, education, military, and general public uses.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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Progress 01/01/01 to 12/31/01
Outputs
This project seeks to catalog all of the major marine animal sound recording collections in North America, assess their needs for restoration, and determine the time, materials, and equipment that would be required to assemble them into a single centralized web-accessible digital archive. The effort involved mail or email contact with 125 potential contributors, aggregation of suitable collections into 11 contiguous geographical regions, visits by technical staff to multiple sites within each region, and the submission of grant proposals based on these data to fund the creation of the archive. The effort identified 72 committed participants with suitable material. A total of 40 different locations were visited resulting in the direct examination of 3500 cassette tapes, 4300 reels, 975 DAT tapes, 1800 VHS audiotapes, and 600 films or videotapes. The number of suitable tapes per collection ranged from several dozen to over 2000, with a mean of 400 tapes/collection.
Taxonomic coverage far exceeds that of any existing marine animal collection. To date, suitable recordings are available for 324 marine species, consisting of 207 fish, 17 birds, 2 reptiles, 3 arthropods, and 95 marine mammals. Grant proposals to fund the library creation have been submitted to the Department of Defense (DURIP) and the Office of Naval Research.
Impacts
This project lays the groundwork for the creation of a centralized digital library of marine animal sounds at Cornell University that would be remotely accessible for research, conservation, management, education, military, and general public uses.
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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