Help! with Heart Rate sound file analysis

Hi All,

I have some difficult files that I need to process. These are files recorded from a transmitter and include heart beats of a wild bird. I am trying to count these beats and calculate the time between beats etc. We are particularly interested in targeting and describing areas in which the rate changes (i.e. flight, foraging, misc. movements).

There was actually a very helpful post that I found on this forum that does exactly what I need: Monitoring time difference between two points on waveform

HOWEVER, I need to better clean the data. There is too much background noise and the heart rate is not always the loudest sound in in a given second etc. Is there way to better fine tune a file so that it will amplify a certain frequency to be the loudest? or a certain band of frequencies? I have dabbled a little and it appears that amplifying and cleaning only does so much and that other peaks or quieter heart beats causes the above program to miss or over count beats.

This has a lot to do with inconsistent sound recording from the transceiver as the animal moves further or closer away from the antenna etc.

I’ve attached a partial file to this post. Would love to some more brain power on this.


Ben

Spectral editing
spectral editing
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/spectrogram_view.html#select

This is great! and ALMOST what I want/need.

I guess that only thing that would fix the last bit would be a script to label the highest amplitude per specified time? Rather than setting a amplitude limit.

Is this possible?

This is due simply to the horrific variation in signal quality. BUT if this is possible to do in audacity then it would solve the problem completely.

Thanks for pointing me toward spectral editing!

Use dynamic range compression or AGC to correct for variable signal strength.

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