multActivity: Multiple Acoustic Activity Matrix

In Ruido: Soundscape Background Noise, Power, and Saturation

Multiple Acoustic Activity Matrix

Description

Calculate the Acoustic Activity Matrix used in the the calculation of Soundscape Saturation using Burivalova 2018 methodology for a set of recordings

Usage

multActivity(
  soundpath,
  channel = "stereo",
  timeBin = 60,
  dbThreshold = -90,
  targetSampRate = NULL,
  wl = 512,
  window = signal::hamming(wl),
  overlap = ceiling(length(window)/2),
  histbreaks = "FD",
  DCfix = TRUE,
  powthr = 10,
  bgnthr = 0.8,
  beta = TRUE,
  backup = NULL
)

Arguments

soundpath	single or multiple directories to your audio files
channel	channel where the saturation values will be extract from. Available channels are: "stereo", "mono", "left" or "right". Defaults to "stereo".
timeBin	size (in seconds) of the time bin. Set to NULL to use the entire audio as a single bin. Defaults to 60
dbThreshold	minimum allowed value of dB for the spectrograms. Set to NULL to leave db values unrestricted Defaults to -90, as set by Towsey 2017
targetSampRate	desired sample rate of the audios. This argument is only used to down sample the audio. If NULL, then audio's sample rate remains the same. Defaults to NULL
wl	window length of the spectrogram. Defaults to 512
window	window used to smooth the spectrogram. Switch to signal::hanning(wl) to use hanning instead. Defaults to signal::hammning(wl)
overlap	overlap between the spectrogram windows. Defaults to wl/2 (half the window length)
histbreaks	breaks used to calculate Background Noise. Available breaks are: "FD", ⁠"Sturges⁠", "scott" and 100. Defaults to "FD". Can also be set to any numerical value to limit or increase the amount of breaks.
DCfix	if the DC offset should be removed before the metrics are calculated. Defaults to TRUE
powthr	single numeric value to calculate the activity matrix for soundscape power (in dB). Defaults to 10
bgnthr	single numeric value to calculate the activity matrix for background noise (in %). Defaults to 0.8
beta	how BGN thresholds are calculated. If TRUE, BGN thresholds are calculated using all recordings combined. If FALSE, BGN thresholds are calculated separately for each recording. Defaults to TRUE
backup	directory to save the backup. Defaults to NULL

Details

In this function, we only generate activity matrices for an directory using Burivalova 2018 methodology. For each time bin of the recording we apply the following formula:

a_{mf} = 1\ if (BGN_{mf} > \theta_{1})\ or\ (POW_{mf} > \theta_{2});\ otherwise,\ a_{mf} = 0,

Where \theta_{1} is the threshold of BGN values and \theta_{2} is a threshold of dB values. 1 = active and 0 = inactive.

If backup is set to a valid directory, a file named "SATBACKUP.RData" is saved after every batch of five processed files. If the function execution is interrupted (e.g., manual termination, an R session crash, or a system shutdown), this backup file can be passed to satBackup() (e.g., as ~path/SATBACKUP.RData) to resume the original process. Once a backup is created, all arguments and file paths must remain unchanged, unless they are manually modified within the .RData object.

Value

A list containing five objects. The first and second objects (powthresh and bgnthresh) are the threshold values inputted as arguments into the function. The third (info) contains the following variables from every audio file: PATH, AUDIO, CHANNEL, DURATION, BIN, SAMPRATE.. The fourth object (values) contains a matrix with the the values of activity for each bin of each recording and the size of the bin in seconds. The fifth contains a list with errors that occurred with specific files during the function.

References

Burivalova, Z., Towsey, M., Boucher, T., Truskinger, A., Apelis, C., Roe, P., & Game, E. T. (2018). Using soundscapes to detect variable degrees of human influence on tropical forests in Papua New Guinea. Conservation Biology, 32(1), 205-215. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12968

See Also

soundSat() and soundMat() to get saturation values. Also, check satBackup() if you are working with larger datasets and want some safety.

Examples

if (require("ggplot2") & require("patchwork")) {
  ### Generating an artificial audio for the example
  ## For this example we'll generate a sweep in a noisy soundscape
  library(ggplot2)
  library(patchwork)

  ### Downloading audiofiles from public Zenodo library
  dir <- paste0(tempdir(), "/forExamples")
  dir.create(dir)
  recName <- paste0("GAL24576_20250401_", sprintf("%06d", seq(0, 200000, by = 50000)), ".wav")
  recDir <- paste(dir, recName, sep = "/")

  for (rec in recName) {
    print(rec)
    url <- paste0("https://zenodo.org/records/17575795/files/",
                  rec,
                  "?download=1")
    download.file(url,
                  destfile = paste(dir, rec, sep = "/"),
                  mode = "wb")
  }

  time <- sapply(strsplit(recName, "_"), function(x)
    paste(substr(x[3], 1, 2), substr(x[3], 3, 4), substr(x[3], 5, 6), sep = ":"))
  date <- sapply(strsplit(recName, "_"), function(x)
    paste(substr(x[2], 1, 4), substr(x[2], 5, 6), substr(x[2], 7, 8), sep = "-"))

  dateTime <- as.POSIXct(paste(date, time))

  timeLabels <- time[c(1, 7, 13, 19, 24)]
  timeBreaks <- as.character(dateTime[c(1, 7, 13, 19, 24)])

  breaks <- round(c(1, cumsum(rep(256 / 6, 6))))

  ### Running the function
  act <- multActivity(dir)

  plotN <- 1

  sDim <- dim(act$values)

  sampRate <- act$info$SAMPRATE[1]
  kHz <- cumsum(c(0, rep(sampRate / 6, 6))) / 1000

  plotList <- list()

  for (cha in c("left", "right")) {
    actCurrent <- act$values[, act$info$CHANNEL == cha]
    actCurrentDF <- data.frame(
      TIME = as.character(rep(dateTime, each = sDim[1])),
      SPEC = rep(seq(sDim[1]), sDim[2]),
      VAL = factor(c(unlist(actCurrent)), levels = c(0, 1))
    )

    plotList[[plotN]] <- ggplot(actCurrentDF, aes(x = TIME, y = SPEC, fill = VAL)) +
      geom_tile() +
      theme_classic() +
      scale_y_continuous(expand = c(NA, NA),
                         labels = kHz,
                         breaks = breaks) +
      scale_x_discrete(expand = c(0, 0),
                       labels = time) +
      scale_fill_manual(values = c("white", "black"),
                        labels = c("Inactive", "Active")) +
      guides(fill = guide_legend(title = "Acoustic Activity")) +
      labs(
        x = "Time of Day",
        y = "Frequency (kHz)",
        title = paste("Acoustic Activity in the", cha, "channel")
      )

    plotN <- plotN + 1

  }

  plotList[[1]] + plotList[[2]] + plot_layout(guide = "collect")

  unlink(recDir)
  unlink(dir)

  }

Ruido documentation built on April 18, 2026, 5:07 p.m.