Supplementary materials for ' Toward a Synthetic Acoustic Ecology: Sonically Situated Evolutionary Agent-Based Models of the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis'

This deposit contains supplementary materials for the paper 'Toward a Synthetic Acoustic Ecology: Sonically Situated Evolutionary Agent-Based Models of the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis',  published at Artificial Life conference 2018.

The dataset contains the source code for our model, the model outputs and the jupyter notebook we used for data analysis.

Abstract:

We introduce the idea of Synthetic Acoustic Ecology (SAC) as a vehicle for transdisciplinary investigation to develop methods and address open theoretical, applied and aesthetic questions in both scientific and artistic investigations of soundscape. Ecoacoustics is an emerging science that investigates and interprets the ecological role of sound. It draws historically from, and is reinvigorating the related arts-humanities discipline of acoustic ecology which studies sonically-mediated relationships between human beings and their environments. Both study the acoustic environment, or soundscape,  as the literal and conceptual site of interaction of human and non-human organisms. However, no coherent theories exist to frame the ecological role of macro soundscape, or to elucidate the evolutionary processes through which it is structured. Similarly there is a lack of appropriate computational methods to analyse soundscape. We propose that a sonically situated flavour of ALife evolutionary agent-based model could build a productive bridge between the art, science and technologies of acoustic ecological investigations to the benefit of all. As a first step, two simple models of the acoustic niche hypothesis are presented which are shown to exhibit emergence of complex spectro-temporal soundscape structures and adaptation to and recovery from noise pollution events.  We discuss the potential of SAC in the future as a lingua franca between empirical and theoretical ecoacoustics, and wider transdisciplinary research in soundscape.