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Scientists have long used sound to better understand nature. NPR's Nate Rott reports on a new tool to help them find sounds in one of nature's more noisy environments, rivers.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: Say you're in your backyard or out for a walk and you hear a bird.
KATIE TURLINGTON: Usually, you can see it.
ROTT: Katie Turlington is a Ph.D. candidate at the Australian Rivers Institute at Griffith University.
TURLINGTON: Or even if you can't, you can whip your phone out and take a recording, upload it online and ID it.
ROTT: Terrestrial animal sounds are all around us. They're familiar.
TURLINGTON: But we obviously don't have that underwater, right? We don't hang out with our heads underwater, so all of these sounds are very foreign to us.
ROTT: And that's especially true for rivers, where Turlington says even if you did put your head underwater or dropped in a waterproof microphone...
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER FLOWING)
ROTT: ...With all of the water flowing, there's so much background noise that it's hard to pick out anything else, which is where Turlington's new tool, a computer program, comes in.
TURLINGTON: So this tool detects that background level. Then anything over that background level, it pulls out.
ROTT: And groups together with similar sounds. So instead of this cacophony...
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER FLOWING)
ROTT: ...You get this.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUGS CHITTERING)
ROTT: The isolated sounds of river bugs.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUGS CHITTERING)
ROTT: Or fish grunts.
(SOUNDBITE OF FISH GRUNTING)
ROTT: Wait, fish grunt?
TURLINGTON: Very bizarre (laughter).
ROTT: Is it just, like, working hard? It's trying to stay in the current or something?
(LAUGHTER)
TURLINGTON: Yeah.
ROTT: Huh.
To be clear, Turlington says only a small percentage of fish make sound. But this new tool can find those sounds within hours instead of the days it would take to manually go through a 24-hour recording and listen. Turlington says she hopes it can help scientists get a baseline of a river's sound.
TURLINGTON: And then once we know what normal is, if we hear any changes, we can go, oh, something's happening. So maybe we lose a species' sound, then we go, oh, let's go and check if something's happened.
ROTT: Or they hear a new one and can go see if it's an invasive species. Either way, she hopes her new acoustic model will help sound become a management tool for people monitoring river health and to help all of us terrestrial beings better understand what's happening under the water.
Nate Rott, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF RELAXING MUSIC'S "UNDERSEA PEACE MUSIC WITH UNDERWATER SOUNDS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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