Biophony

About Biophony

Biophony is a bioacoustics field lab for people who take wildlife sound seriously — birders, herpers, entomologists, field recordists and foley artists. Record, visualise and study calls in the field, with a real DSP engine and a curated reference library, and never send a single byte to a server.

RECORD, BROADCAST QUALITY
Capture 24-bit linear-PCM WAV at your device's full sample rate. Biophony records in measurement mode, so the microphone isn't coloured by automatic gain or equalisation — you get the signal as it was heard. A live input meter shows level and peak in real time.

LIVE SPECTROGRAM
Watch a scrolling spectrogram drawn by a genuine Short-Time Fourier Transform (Hann-windowed FFT computed with Accelerate/vDSP) — not a decorative animation. Switch between a logarithmic and linear frequency axis, the way bioacousticians actually read a sonogram.

A CURATED REFERENCE LIBRARY
Browse a labelled library of bird, amphibian and insect recordings, each with its own precomputed spectrogram, taxonomy and acoustic measurements. Species labels are verified against the GBIF taxonomic backbone, and every recording is openly licensed and fully credited inside the app.

A/B COMPARISON BENCH
Load a reference call and one of your own recordings — or any two clips — side by side. Compare their spectrograms and a full set of measurements: dominant frequency, spectral centroid, bandwidth, roll-off, spectral flatness and pulse rate, with a spectral-similarity score.

HONEST ACOUSTIC MATCHING
Point Biophony at a recording and it ranks the reference library by spectral-envelope similarity to help guide your judgement. Biophony does not pretend to automatically identify species — it gives you the measurements, the spectrogram and the reference calls, and lets you decide.

FIELD LOG WITH MARKERS
Save recordings with titles and notes, drop timestamped markers on the timeline, and add an optional coordinate stamp. Everything is stored locally.

EXPORT
Share the original WAV, export a 24-bit AIFF, or render a spectrogram to a PNG image.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
- Works completely offline
- No account, no subscription, no cloud
- No analytics, no tracking
- Recordings, notes, markers and any optional location stay on your device

Pay once. Own it. Use it anywhere — a dawn chorus, a pond at night, a plane with no signal.

ABOUT THE DATA
The bundled reference recordings are sourced from Wikimedia Commons under CC0, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) and public-domain terms. Every recording, its author or credit and its licence are listed in the app's About screen and in the repository's attributions file.

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