Starting the automated sound processing for the first time
When you click the ‘start’ button, SA+ will start monitoring the input addresses to detect
new sound files. Then, SA+ processes each sound file separately. It first performs
spectral analysis and feature calculation, segmentation and computation of syllable
features. Based on those measures it ‘decides’ if to save or discard the data. A decision to
save means that 1) the sound file will be moved to a permanent storage address, 2) the
raw feature file will be created and saved in a permanent storage address, and 3) the
detected syllable features will be saved by adding records to the syllable-table of this
animal.
Vocalization or noise? The Sound Analysis Recorder already eliminated all the ‘empty’
sound streams from the recording channel based on simple amplitude filtering. We now
need to make an accurate determination for each time window, if it contains animal
vocalization or not. SA+ uses several criteria to make this determination, and here we
only discuss (in a nutshell) the two central controls, which are amplitude and Wiener
entropy thresholds. The yellow slider at the left of each spectral display is for controlling
amplitude threshold, whereas the red slider is for controlling the Wiener entropy
threshold. In other modules of SA+ you can change these controls ‘live’ while SA+
interactively updates the display and the calculation of features. However, this ‘live;
feature is implemented in the ‘live’ mode, since in this mode, SA+ keeps bouncing from
processing one sound to the other. This means that whatever change you have made to
the sliders, you will only see its outcome the next time this channel processes a sound
file. We therefore recommend that you first make yourself familiar with how these sliders
work in the ‘Explore & Score’ module.
Setting the amplitude threshold:
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