Visualization of environmental audio using ribbon plots and acoustic state sequences

Long-duration audio-recordings of the environment are useful for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem function. The technique is now widely used due to technological advances in recording technology. However, although the acquisition of audio has become quick and efficient, its analysis and interpretation remains comparatively slow and difficult. In this work, we describe a method to visualize long duration audio, thereby facilitating its analysis and exploration. We reduce the audio to vectors of acoustic indices and then cluster the vectors into recognizable classes. Despite this data reduction (six orders of magnitude), much useful ecological information remains. We demonstrate how acoustic vectors can be converted to ribbon plots to visualize weeks and months of recording. Acoustic clusters allow conversion of long-duration audio to a sequence of acoustic states which can then be visualized using sequence analysis software