Luscinia has moved to a new location. Please use that site! This current site will remain active, but is already out of date.
Luscinia is free software, written in the Java language. It should work on all major computing platforms. Download Luscinia from its new sitehere
Luscinia's New Project web page here
What does Luscinia do?
Luscinia is a database-oriented biacoustics computer program. It helps you organize, archive, measure and analyze recordings. By organizing recordings in databases, Luscinia makes it easy to back-up recordings and collaborate with others. Luscinia stores information about recording equipment, locations, and recordists with the recordings themselves, encouraging proper archiving of recordings.
Luscinia provides a flexible spectrogram view of sounds. The appearance of spectrograms (Fonts, tick-marks and other details) can be modified to make spectrograms suitable for publication. An ‘echo-removal’ function improves the appearance of spectrograms of field recordings. Sound playback (at different speeds), and an advanced pitch view (showing the fundamental frequency, and suitable for harmonically structured signals) are also provided.
Luscinia measures 15 acoustic features of sounds at each point in the signal, and stores them in the database. The aim is to avoid repeated measurement of sounds for different analyses. Measurement uses a flexible semi-automated approach that is rapid for clean recordings, but still accurate for noisier recordings.
Luscinia allows you to set up planned comparisons of certain sets of recordings - for example in tutor/tutee experiments - or analysis of large datasets from whole populations.
Sounds can be compared computationally with a multivariate approach or with dynamic time-warping. The outputs can be analyzed with interactive PCA style plots or dendrograms. A variety of statistics for clustering, syntactical analysis, and analysis of geographic variation are provided. Results can be saved to a spreadsheet for further analysis.
Analyses using human comparisons of recordings, using either visual comparison of spectrograms, or auditory comparison of sounds can be set up. Users ratings of similarities are saved into the database, facilitating analyses with multiple observers.
Summary statistics of sounds (e.g. element length, maximum fundamental frequency, mean harmonicity) can be extracted and saved to a spreadsheet.
What does Luscinia not do?
Luscinia is not (yet) suitable as a general sound editor, and does not (yet) make real-time spectrographs. It also doesn’t make measurements from the sound’s waveform (only from the spectrograph). It doesn’t carry out cross-correlations. I welcome suggestions. Check out some of these other excellent free software projects if you think Luscinia might not meet your needs.