Visualizing five decades of environmental acoustic data

Monitoring the environment with acoustic sensors is now practical; sensors are sold as commercial devices, storage is cheap, and the field of ecoacoustics is recognized as an effective way to scale monitoring of the environment. However, a pressing challenge faced in many eScience projects is how to manage, analyze, and visualize very large data so that scientists can benefit, with ecoacoustic data presenting its own particular challenges. This paper presents a new zoomable interactive visualization interface for the exploration of environmental audio data. The interface is a new tool in the Acoustic Workbench, an ecoacoustics software platform built for managing environmental audio data. This Google Maps like interface for audio data, enables zooming in and out of audio data by incorporating specialized, multiresolution, visual representations of audio data into the workbench website. The ‘zooming’ visualization allows scientists to surface the structure, detail, and patterns in content that would otherwise be opaque to them, from scales of seconds through to weeks of data. The Ecosounds instance of the Acoustic Workbench contains 52 years (108 TB) of audio data, from 1016 locations, which results in a 180 million-tile, 8.3 terapixel visualization. The design and implementation of this novel big audio data visualization is presented along with some design considerations for storing visualization tiles.