Sound analysis for field and laboratory research
Syrinx was made for the practical work of animal acoustic communication: recording birdsong in the field, monitoring vocal animals in the lab, measuring spectrograms, and running playback experiments. It runs on Windows 98, 2000, and XP.
What Syrinx does
The program grew out of field playback and direct to disk recording, then added the analysis tools that researchers kept asking for.
Sounds are recorded directly to disk on a sound card equipped computer with a microphone. A scrolling spectrogram shows the incoming sound while it is captured, and a single key press stores the most recent audio buffer to a wave file. This makes it possible to collect a bird repertoire quickly in the field for later playback and analysis.
Run on a modest PC, Syrinx works as an automatic sound detector for long laboratory sessions. Sound events are stored as a numbered series of wave files, with an optional time and date stamp for unique file names. Recordings that would fill hundreds of hours of tape can be reduced to the songs and calls that matter.
Sounds are analyzed as spectrograms. Several displays can be opened at once, saved for later recall, printed on a black and white printer, or copied into drawing programs as illustrations. Time and frequency cursors take measurements directly from the display and write them to text logs. Long recordings and multichannel files from microphone arrays can also be browsed.
Syrinx brings recording, display, and playback together for interactive experiments. A notebook computer, microphone, and speaker are enough. Spectrograms of playback songs, recorded songs, and the song of the subject can be compared at a glance, and the next stimulus can be chosen and delivered without leaving the display. A simple behavior entry feature maps keys to events, then writes a trial log with start and end times.
Example display
The upper four rows hold short, instantly playable spectrograms. The longer panel at the bottom is a real time scrolling display of a field tape, and microphone input looks the same. Windows can be resized, recorded into, printed, and saved as a display for quick recall.
Each sound can be edited, filtered with the sound tools, saved, played, or measured with the time and frequency cursors. The same display is used for live recording, playback, and the analysis of stored recordings.
Release ledger
The current release is 2.4o. There is no Beta version.
The previous version was 2.4i, dated 1 January 2005.
Send the information on the request page and put Syrinx request in the subject line. You will receive a link to the download by email.