Australian Acoustic Observatory Search
The Australian Acoustic Observatory (https://acousticobservatory.org/) has 360 microphones across the continent, and over 2 million hours of audio. However, none of it is labeled: We want to make this enormous repository useful to researchers. We have found that researchers are often looking for 'hard' signals - specific call-types, birds with very little available training data, and so on. So we built an acoustic-similarity search tool, allowing researchers to provide an example of what they're looking for, which we then match against embeddings from the A2O dataset. Here's…
Australian Acoustic Observatory Search launched on December 1, 2023 with 53 votes, #727 of 3,780 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
The Australian Acoustic Observatory Search is a tool that helps researchers find specific animal sounds within a massive unlabeled audio archive. The system contains over 2 million hours of recordings from 360 microphones across Australia. Users submit an audio example of what they're looking for—such as a particular bird call or rare species vocalization—and the tool matches it against the dataset using acoustic similarity, making the vast repository searchable for wildlife researchers studying specific species with limited training data.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Run audio similarity search on the Australian Acoustic Observatory media archive
In the maker’s words, at launch
The Australian Acoustic Observatory (https://acousticobservatory.org/) has 360 microphones across the continent, and over 2 million hours of audio. However, none of it is labeled: We want to make this enormous repository useful to researchers. We have found that researchers are often looking for 'hard'…
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