Sound Onion: Serious acoustic analysis, for thousands of recordings.

Everything a review needs, in your browser

• See it

  Zoom from a whole recording down to a single call. Drag a ceiling down the decibel scale to take off the loud sounds; what is left is coloured again, so the quiet ones stand out.

• Hear it

  Play the original samples slowed down, or shifted down into hearing as a bat detector does, filtered to the band on screen.

• Measure it

  Measure a sound's band, pulses and their spacing, and see how closely it matches each animal and device in the catalogue, as a percentage.

• Annotate it

  Box a sound and say what it is. Each reviewer's answers are plain files beside the audio, and their earlier answers are kept.

• Your other data

  Positions, sensor readings and samples taken at the same time: we join them onto each recording.

• Filter by level

  As it plays, take out what is louder or quieter than a level you set, frequency by frequency.

• Export

  Save any view as a PNG, and up to ten minutes of any sound as a WAV, exactly as you heard it.

• Any WAV

  8, 16, 24 and 32-bit integer or 32-bit float, at any sample rate.

• Cross-reference

  Join your data sets with each other and with public data sets, each listed with its licence.

• On the map

  Every clip with a position as a pin on a map, coloured by its verdict, beside the track it was recorded along.

Every recording where it was made

See each clip where it was recorded, what your reviewers found there, and what lies around it.

• Pins by verdict

  Every clip with a position is a pin, coloured by what its reviewers decided; open one to hear it.

• The tracks

  The route each recording was made along, from the boat's own position fixes.

• What lies around

  Protected areas, wind farms, ports and seamarks, from the data sets chosen for your site, each with its licence.

One platform for every field that listens

Built first for underwater bioacoustics, where we are today. Sound Onion shows any sound as a picture you can hear and measure, so the same tools carry across; these are the fields we are taking it into next.

• Where we are today

  Marine and underwater bioacoustics

  Months of hydrophone recordings: whales, dolphins and seals picked out from pingers, boats and the sea's own noise.

• Next

  Wildlife, ornithology and environmental monitoring

  Dawn choruses and bat passes: ultrasound slowed down or shifted into hearing, each call measured, each reviewer's answer kept.

• Next

  Machine-condition monitoring

  Bearings, gearboxes and pumps: measure their tones and harmonics, time their pulses, and have your team review every recording.

• Next

  Automotive noise, vibration and harshness

  Run-ups and road tests: harmonics show as lines across the spectrogram; pick out a whine by its band and play it on its own.

• Next

  Building acoustics

  Building services noise, impacts and sound through walls: pick out any band by eye and ear, and save it as a picture and a clip for the report.

• Next

  Audio forensics and security acoustics

  Mark every event in time and frequency, hear it on its own, export it exactly as heard, and keep each reviewer's answers in their own files.

Defined formats. Your own scripts.

Every recording's details, every detection, every review and every correction is a plain, documented file beside the audio, with a version number. Write your own scripts against them and analyse everything in Sound Onion, at any scale. Nothing is locked in.

• Your own detector

  If your detector or model writes its results in our documented format, your team reviews them in Sound Onion exactly as it reviews ours.

• Your own data

  Your WAVs stay in your folders, named as you named them; the files Sound Onion adds sit beside them.

• The analyser, open

  Acoustic Analyzer, our analyser, will be released as open source under the Apache 2.0 licence.

Your recordings, in storage you reach directly

Your recordings sit in your own storage area, which you reach directly over SFTP, SSHFS, SMB or WebDAV: upload to it, mount it as a drive, and run your own scripts over everything in it.

• Lossless

  You hear and measure the original file, never a compressed copy.

• Only what you look at

  Analyse reads only the seconds on screen: five seconds of a 460 MB recording is about 2.5 MB.

• Read in place

  Sound Onion reads your recordings where they are stored and writes its own files beside them.

• Behind your login

  Your copy of Sound Onion sits on your own storage and is reached only through its login.

How it works

Today, in beta: we set up your storage and your copy of Sound Onion with you, and agree the price with you.

When we open, in four steps: you choose your site's computing power and storage, or run it on your own machine.

1. 1 · A login

   Create your own login.

2. 2 · A site

   Create your site, at name.sound-onion.com, and add your team to it.

3. 3 · Its compute

   Choose how much computing power it has; grow or shrink it as your work changes.

4. 4 · Its storage

   Choose how much space it has; grow or shrink it as your recordings do.

Or, when we open, your own machine: run our agent on the computer that holds your recordings, and your site uses that machine's computing power and storage instead.

Developed in collaboration with

We work with our users to expand Sound Onion as their research grows: a working partnership, not only a licence.