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by psc 192 days ago
I've been working on a citizen science version of this, we have 7 hydrophones deployed that anyone can listen to live:

https://live.orcasound.net/

These hydrophones are a bit more expensive (~$1k per deployment) but still very accessible compared to how much it usually costs. And the goal is to bring the cost down to the ~$100 range (so $5 is very impressive!):

https://experiment.com/projects/can-low-cost-diy-hydrophones...

All the data is being saved (used for scientific research & ML training), with some of the hydrophones going back to 2017, and yes it's quite difficult to listen to and review so much audio. Better tools like the hydrophone explorer UI are much needed (been working on something similar).

One of the things that's surprised me the most is how difficult to keep hydrophones up and running. I can sympathize with both the technical and social challenges—underwater is not a friendly environment for electronics, and it can be difficult to get permission to deploy hydrophones. But it's incredibly rewarding when it works and you capture some cool sounds.

For anyone interested, all the code is open source and acoustic data is freely available:

Code: https://github.com/orcasound/

Data: https://registry.opendata.aws/orcasound/

Community: https://orcasound.zulipchat.com/

1 comments

> Better tools like the hydrophone explorer UI are much needed (been working on something similar).

Where could I learn more about requirements for this as a I love building tools like this.

It's actually partly built, still in beta testing (has some bugs) but here's a nice example: https://live.orcasound.net/bouts/bout_031YiYO7OqPbPhcmP3mQeb

Requirements are pretty flexible, but the inspiration is largely iNaturalist, and also this very cool project put together by Google Creative Lab back in 2019 https://patternradio.withgoogle.com/

Best place to learn more is to stop by the community Zulip chat (https://orcasound.zulipchat.com/) and ask questions, it's full of really knowledgeable people. Also you can explore the entire codebase here: https://github.com/orcasound/orcasite