SiPLABoratory

PAM2py - Passive Acoustic Monitoring for Python

Passive acoustic monitoring is the technique of choice for listening to marine mammals, monitoring the ocean soundscape and evaluating anthropogenic noise harmful to marine life. Accurate ocean sound monitoring requires an endless number of continuous recordings over large remote areas, performed by different teams, often from different countries and using an array of different recorders. Different recorders have different hardware specific sensitivities, gains and bandwidth filtering characteristics. Those different characteristics require proper calibration to a common standard allowing for integration into a single coherent picture of the ocean soundscape.

PAMGuide does exactly that: it allows for a proper compensation of hardware differences and provides a standard for calculation of sound pressure level (SPL). But in order for the SPL of individual recorders to be integrated into a larger soundscape picture it needs to be put along side context information (metadata) and exchanged between institutions.

The PAM2Py package implements the PAMGuide in Python with three important features and extensions:

• written in open source Python language allows for PAM2Py to be license free and therefore run independently from any proprietary software (such as Matlab).
• PAM2Py extends PAMGuide with the Exchange Data Format (EDF) that defines a metadata descriptor self-contained format of averaged SPL data specially designed to reduce data sensitivity and facilitate exchange.
• the EDF format implemented in PAM2Py also allows for exchanging modelled SPL data soundscape data resulting from simulations or other software

PAM2Py is a tool developed under project JONAS - Joint Framework for Ocean Noise in the Atlantic Seas funded by the Atlantic Arc INTERREG EU program.