National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
United States Department of Commerce


 

FY 2002

Ishmael 1.0 User's Guide. ISHMAEL: Integrated System for Holistic Multi-channel Acoustic Exploration and Localization

Mellinger, D.K.

NOAA Tech. Memo. OAR PMEL-120, NTIS: PB2002-105264, NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, WA, 26 pp (2002)


Ishmael is a program for acoustic analysis. It contains a spectrogram viewer, three acoustic localization methods, three methods for automatic call detection, real-time sound recording, a beamformer, and a log file annotation feature. It is more or less a collection of methods that have been found useful for analyzing acoustic data sets.

Ishmael's capabilities are primarily aimed at processing large amounts of sound data quickly and relatively easily. The sound can be a collection of sound files, or a signal arriving in real time from one or more microphone(s) or hydrophone(s).

The most basic operation in Ishmael is viewing a spectrogram. The spectrogram is a method for displaying sounds for visual inspection and analysis. A spectrogram shows time on one axis (in Ishmael, the horizontal axis) and frequency on the other axis. If you've never used spectrograms before and wish to learn more about them, I recommend Principles of Animal Communication (Bradbury and Vehrencamp, 1998). Another way to learn is to experiment with Ishmael, preferably with someone more knowledgeable nearby to answer occasional questions.

Ishmael runs in Windows. It has been tested, so far, in Windows 95, 98, 2000, and NT. The hardware must be a 486 or Pentium type processor. The amount of memory needed depends on the operating system; use at least 32 Mbytes for Windows 95 and 98, and 64 MBytes for Windows 2000 and NT. The screen size should be at least 800 x 600 so that all of the dialog boxes fit.




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