Rapidly Review and Edit your Recordings

SonoBat 4 is at its core, a file viewer for ultrasound recordings of bats. Use this functionality to rapidly review your recordings, in both real time representation and a compressed representation of the echolocation data only.
Take advantage of the full spectrum data in your recordings to visualize more than just your bat echolocation pulses. The acoustic environment, the microphone placement quality, and the quality of the recording of the bat itself is easily visualized in this environment.
If you wish to manually sort your data you can use this interface to discard noise files, consider and vet automatic ID decisions, or save choice selections of recordings for future use.

Automated Species ID

Based on millions of vetted recordings of bats from across North America, the SonoBat classifier engine mimics the workflow of an expert vetting files. Not only does the classier estimate what species of bat is in a recording but also considers the factors an expert user would take into account before defining confidence to that species ID decision. If the recording is to faint for all the necessary features of a classification to be apparent? SonoBat will sort that classification out rather than report an imperfect classification.

As a research tool SonoBat is completely transparent on what it classifies and why. When you classify a batch of files a universally formatted spreadsheet is created for your use containing the classification and the metrics of each classification. Need more? turn on Parameter reporting to generate a similar spreadsheet of the 100 + features SonoBat recognizes in a echolocation pulse and uses to come to a species ID conclusion.

The results speak for themselves. If you are curious on details of our classifier and see a list of recent publications that have used the SonoBat classifier in their work, follow the link below.

Manage Metadata

The difference between a valuable dataset representing time and effort from in and out of the field and a folder of audio data that will serve no future purpose is the metadata. SonoBat was built from the ground up to incorporate robust metadata into it’s file management. Filename’s and metadata can be augmented in batch processes across multiple nights and multiple sites of data.

Full Spectrum Analysis

With full spectrum sound the nuances of bat signals can be parsed from a noise floor. We can take advantage of this to find and work with bat calls that would have been lost in zero cross analysis.

Unlike Zero-Cross which only keeps track of the loudest frequency, full spectrum can clearly visualize quieter components of a echolocation call. In building our classification engine, we have found these subtle components to have a massive import on accurate species identification.

For example, for many Myotis species the final inflection of the echolocation call has a great deal of import for classification, but it is often quiet compared to the surrounding call. Worse still in zero cross this ending inflection can be ‘masked’ by echos from the earlier parts of the call. Without full spectrum this information cannot be reconstructed.

Regional, and Precise

SonoBat’s classifier is optimized for the bats of particular regions of North America, rather than a ‘best case attempt’ at a single classifier for the myriad of unique inter-species dynamics across the continent. SonoBat 4 bundles several of these regional classifiers to cover distinct blocks of the United States and Canada.