Challenges in Designing Visual Analytics for Environmental Acoustic Monitoring
Tshering Dema, Margot F. Brereton, Paul Roe, Jinglan Zhang, Michael Towsey · 2016
The sounds of animals leave remarkable traces of information about their habitat. Ecologists use environmental sound as a proxy to monitor the environment. This has led to the collection of massive sound archives, posing a big data problem of how to investigate it all. Visualization can transform aural information into visual representations summarizing huge datasets, revealing patterns, trends, and relationships in the data. New techniques in interactive visual analysis will enable ecologists to explore and mine for insights about animals and the environment. We envision a synergistic design cycle of discovery and refinement between the user and the system. However, this gives rise to a unique set of design challenges in crafting interactive visual analytic techniques that can cater for large, highly contextual and complex environmental acoustics. This paper presents the key characteristics of big environmental sound data and identifies challenges in designing visual analytics for ecological investigations.