Chirp is a suite of software for analyzing and comparing bioacoustic signals. It consists of the following semi-independent components:

• A graphical interface for viewing conventional and time-frequency reassignment spectrograms.

  • Select, play, and zoom in on sections of recordings; adjust spectrogram parameters interactively.
  • Define temporal and spectrotemporal regions of interest; save in simple text-based files for further analysis

• An advanced signal processing algorithm for tracking the pitch (fundamental frequency) of tonal signals. Designed for use with noisy field recordings.

• A dynamic time-warping algorithm for quantitatively comparing the spectrograms and pitch traces of signals. Supports batch processing on multicore machines for large datasets.

• Plugin architecture supporting additional algorithms for comparing signals (currently includes spectrographic cross-correlation)

The current version of chirp is 1.2.2

Resources

• The project source code
• The project wiki (includes tutorials)