PNNL

Abstract

Fishes and other marine mammals suffer a range of potential effects from intense sound sources generated by anthropogenic underwater processes such as pile driving, shipping, sonars, and underwater blasting. Several underwater sound recording devices (USR) were built to monitor the acoustic sound pressure waves generated by those anthropogenic underwater activities, so the relevant processing software becomes indispensable for analyzing the audio files recorded by these USRs. However, existing software packages did not meet performance and flexibility requirements. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of a new software package, named Aquatic Acoustic Metrics Interface (AAMI), which is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) designed for underwater sound monitoring and analysis. In addition to the general functions, such as loading and editing audio files recorded by USRs, the software can compute a series of acoustic metrics in physical units, monitor the sound’s influence on fish hearing according to audiograms from different species of fishes and marine mammals, and batch process the sound files. The detailed applications of the software AAMI will be discussed along with several test case scenarios to illustrate its functionality.