Overview of Koe workflow

We designed the Koe workflow to be intuitive and flexible. Here is a suggested workflow:

Koe workflow

  • Import raw recordings and divide into “songs” (vocalisation bouts), then segment songs into their constituent acoustic units.

  • You can extract acoustic features from units. These features are used to calculate unit similarity and expedite classification in two ways: through interactive ordination, and similarity indices.

  • Interactive ordination is a major time saver for classification. The user can encircle groups of points on the ordination to see spectrograms, hear playback, and bulk-label groups of units. Harnessing the interactive ordination in conjunction with human audio-visual perception, this technique offers a major advance in both speed and robustness over existing acoustic classification methods.

  • Units can also be viewed as an interactive unit table. A key feature of the unit table is the similarity index, which lets you sort by acoustic similarity. Because similar-sounding units are grouped together, units can easily be selected in bulk and classified.

  • A catalogue of class exemplars is generated automatically, displaying up to 10 randomly chosen exemplars for each class, which serves as a useful reference during classification.

  • Koe gives you full control of your databases, allowing you to add collaborators and set permission levels. This makes it straightforward to conduct a classification validation experiment: grant judges labelling access to your database, and once they have independently classified the units, compile their labels to examine concordance.

  • Once units have been classified, songs can be visualised as sequences of unit labels; you can filter by sequence to identify all instances of a specific song type, for example. You can also mine sequence structure in detail with association rule algorithms and network visualisations.

  • Export data from any program view as csv.