JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Scientists have long used sound to better understand nature. 91ÖÆƬ³§'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, 91ÖÆƬ³§ News.
(SOUNDBITE OF RELAXING MUSIC'S "UNDERSEA PEACE MUSIC WITH UNDERWATER SOUNDS") Transcript provided by 91ÖÆƬ³§, Copyright 91ÖÆƬ³§.
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