Visualization and Quantification of the Activities of Animal Vocalizations in Forest Species Using Robot Audition Techniques
1 Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan; (R.S.); (S.S.); (T.A.)
2 School of Policy Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University, 2-1, Gakuen, Sanda, Hyogo 669-1337, Japan;
3 Department of Systems and Control Engineering, School of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1, Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552, Japan;
4 Kyoto University, Japan, Yoshida-honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan;
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Corresponding author:
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 7 Jun 2022 / Revised: 26 Dec 2022 / Accepted: 5 Apr 2023 / Published: 7 Dec 2023
Abstract
Ecoacoustics is a recent ecological discipline focusing on the ecological role of sounds. This study applies robot audition techniques and ecoacoustic methods in the visualization and quantification of forest animal vocalization, focusing mainly on inter-specific interactions between birds and cicadas. We adopt HARK, an open-source robot audition software, which enables us to estimate the direction of arrival of sound sources and their separated sounds using a microphone array unit. We focus on recordings in an experimental forest in Japan, where birds and cicadas dominate the soundscape. Cicada songs were further replayed at a regular interval repeatedly. We create a false-colour spectrogram based on the directions of arrival of sounds to grasp the individual-level dynamics of the soundscape of birds and cicadas in the recording. We further describe a method to classify their vocalizations using three ecoacoustic indices, then illustrate their temporal vocalization dynamics, measured as the total song duration in each time segment. We also conducted a quantitative analysis of their vocal activities to determine if there exist interactions among birds and cicadas, and the effects of replayed vocalizations of cicadas on them. The preliminary analysis implied that there might exist temporal overlap avoidance behaviours between birds and cicadas, and replayed songs of cicadas may reduce the activity of birds. We believe that this proof-of-concept observation and analysis can contribute to the further development of the fine-scale measurement of the biodiversity or habitat quality of environments based on the vocal activities of multiple species, while further detailed analysis is necessary.
Keywords: robot audition techniques; ecoacoustics; acoustic indices; bird songs; cicada songs; vocal activity; HARKBird
OPEN ACCESS
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
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provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
CITE
Zhao, H.; Suzuki, R.; Sumitani, S.; Matsubayashi, S.; Arita, T.; Nakadai, K.; Okuno, H.G. Visualization and Quantification of the Activities of Animal Vocalizations in Forest Species Using Robot Audition Techniques. JEA 2023, 7, 2.
Zhao H, Suzuki R, Sumitani S, Matsubayashi S, Arita T, Nakadai K, Okuno HG. Visualization and Quantification of the Activities of Animal Vocalizations in Forest Species Using Robot Audition Techniques. Journal of Ecoacoustics. 2023; 7(1):2.
Zhao, Hao; Suzuki, Reiji; Sumitani, Shinji; Matsubayashi, Shiho; Arita, Takaya; Nakadai, Kazuhiro; Okuno, Hiroshi G. 2023. "Visualization and Quantification of the Activities of Animal Vocalizations in Forest Species Using Robot Audition Techniques." JEA 7, no. 1: 2.
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