Preliminaries

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Passive acoustic monitoring can be applied in two fields: Ecoacoustics and Bioacoustics. 

Although these domains share that they both listen to nature sounds, they differ in fact.

• Ecoacoustic expands the traditional concept of soundscapes by using sound analysis to explore ecological processes. It delves into how the acoustic environment can provide insights into the health, diversity, and dynamics of ecosystems. In 1993, one of the foundational works to merge soundscapes with evaluating habitat health was the work by Krause. This paper shows the importance of the acoustic landscape to understand the biodiversity of ecosystems.

• Bioacoustics is the scientific study of how animals produce and use sound for communication. This field explores the behavior and biology of animals, focusing on the mechanics of sound production and how animals interact with their environment through sound.

 While bioacoustics often examines specific species or compares a few species, it is distinct from soundscape ecology, which looks at the broader interactions between all sounds in an environment, including natural and human-made noises.

 For better comprehension, the differences between these fields can be illustrated as in Figure 1.

ECOACOUSTIC DESCRIPTION

• Soundscape: This is the study of the auditory environment of a specific landscape, encompassing all the  sounds present in the area to represent the relationship between the sounds (natural, biological, human- made noises) and the landscape. Krause  categorized soundscapes into three main components: biophony (sounds created by living organisms), geophony (non-living environmental sounds like wind or rain), and anthrophony (sounds generated by human activity).

• Sonotope: This domain refers to the connection between sound and a specific location. In fields like geography and anthropology, a sonotope  underscores how sound shapes and is intricately linked to particular places. It emphasizes how the distinctive acoustic characteristics of a location, such as the chirping of birds in a forest, help define and enrich its identity and significance.

• Sonoscape: Ecoacoustics Theory by Farina and Li (2022) suggests that the sonoscape represents the complete array of all the uninterpreted sounds present within a landscape.

REFERENCES

W. Prummel, "Inductive Graph Neural Networks for Passive Vision and Acoustic Monitoring", PhD Thesis, Laboratoire MIA, Univ. La Rochelle,  November 2024.