Introduction to the SonoScape, an Open-Source Software Application in MATLAB^®

Abstract

SonoScape is a new software to process wav files using a full set of Acoustic Complexity metrics [the ACI metrics (ACIf_t, ACIt_f) and derivative indices: ACIf_t evenness, ACIt_f evenness, Sonic Signature Dissimilarity (SSD), Ecoacoustic Events (EE), EE Entropy, and Fractal dimensions of EE and SSD], developed under the MATLAB^® platform. SonoScape is enriched of several options to manage single and large collection of sonic files. It enables a hierarchical structure of file management and fully automates the ecoacoustic analyses of sonic files stored across different folders/layers on the disk, optimally and maximally reducing human efforts in the repetitive manual operations on each single file or folder. This possibility allows automatic computation of files belonging to different days and different recording stations, or different seasons inside the same recording station. SonoScape can operate at different clumping and temporal scales. An energy filter can be applied along a range of values returning information on the importance of signals inside a near or a far field. Exclusion of some frequencies in the calculation can also be obtained through the frequency filter parameter. The SonoScape yields human-readable results for each individual acoustic signal as well as summary files to ease subsequent analyses including statistical analyses. It returns analytic results and their aggregations according to different configurations. It also offers functions to visualize the results using customized 3-D plots or ternary plots, intuitively demonstrating the patterns of ACIs based on the vast number of numerical results. SonoScape provides utilities including the export of the FFT matrix for each wav file, the export of EE ternary plots for each folder, the sorting of wav files according to hours and days, and the setting of Max value of ACIf_t for encoding EE.