Soundscape China: Listening to the Sounds of Nature with AI

What this was about

Congtian Lin presented Soundscape China, a national initiative to build a passive acoustic monitoring network, a nature-sound database and AI models, while involving citizen scientists and sound artists. The project tests sound sensors from different companies against standards (4G/5G data transfer, solar power, over 50 days' storage); about 280 devices have been deployed by over 110 participating organisations at more than 260 sites, yielding over 3.6 million records in one year. The platform includes a citizen-science recording app, an annotation tool with volunteers, a localised extension of Audubon Core, and a self-supervised pre-trained spectrogram model for sound event detection and classification, illustrated with bird-call activity patterns at three sites in Shandong Province.

Why it matters. Standardised, large-scale acoustic data and open datasets are prerequisites for training reliable sound-recognition models and for using soundscapes as biodiversity indicators.

In the room

• Soundscape ecology treats sound diversity as an indicator of biodiversity.
• Framework: platform of sensors, models and database; services for data sharing, annotation, analysis and model training; audiences in monitoring, sound art and citizen science.
• Device standards: 4G/5G automatic transfer, solar-powered, >50 days storage, plus plug-in microphones for citizen scientists.
• About 280 devices, 110+ organisations, 260+ sites.
• Audubon Core was used as the data standard but extended and localised, e.g. for equipment information.
• Pre-training on time and frequency patches of spectrograms supports downstream sound event detection and classification.
• The programme is endorsed by ISSP within the UNESCO science decade.

Notable moments