El Silencio Soundscapes: A dataset for leveraging unlabelled data in machine learning models for passive acoustic monitoring

Description:

El Silencio Soundscapes is an extension of the original El Silencio Multi-taxonomic dataset, which served as a target dataset for the BirdCLEF+ 2025 challenge. This dataset provides a collection of unlabeled soundscape recordings captured via passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) in the Middle Magdalena region of Colombia.

Dataset Structure & Temporal Coverage:
The dataset comprises a total of 10,980 unlabelled audio files across 63 distinct monitoring sites, some of which geographically overlap with the labelled parent dataset.

• Format: 1-minute raw audio files.
• Uniform Site Distribution: Each of the 61 sites contributes exactly 180 recordings.
• Continuous Duty Cycle: The data captures a 38-day continuous monitoring window spanning from April 19 to May 26, 2023.
• 24-Hour Coverage: Because the autonomous recording units utilised a continuous duty cycle, the hourly distribution of the files is remarkably uniform. The acoustic data evenly represent all 24 hours of the diurnal and nocturnal cycles, free from targeted time-of-day sampling bias.

Applications:
This dataset is publicly available to motivate machine learning researchers to explore innovative methods for computational bioacoustics using real-world deployment scenarios. It is particularly well-suited for benchmarking models, developing deep feature extraction pipelines, and advancing self-supervised learning techniques on unlabelled acoustic data.

Citation:

If you find the El Silencio Soundscapes useful for your research, please consider citing the paper as follows:

@inproceedings{canas2025overview,
  title={Overview of BirdCLEF+ 2025: Multi-taxonomic sound identification in the Middle Magdalena, Colombia},
  author={Ca{\~n}as, Juan Sebasti{\'a}n and Kahl, Stefan and Denton, Tom and Toro-G{\'o}mez, Maria Paula and Rodriguez-Buritica, Susana and Benavides-Lopez, Jose Luis and Ulloa, Juan Sebasti{\'a}n and Caycedo-Rosales, Paula and Klinck, Holger and Go{\"e}au, Herv{\'e} and others},
  booktitle={Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2025)},
  number={4038},
  pages={2909--2919},
  year={2025},
  organization={CEUR-WS}
}