Vocalization analysis

[lily]

To anyone who could maybe help. Reading most of these posts it seems clear to me that I am kind of out of my league. I work with animals and am interested in measuring animal vocalizations - I am interested in finding differences in frequencies between animals and treatment groups in my research. Is Audacity useful for analyzing vocalizations? It seems to have a lot of features but I was curious to hear some comments about its capacities to scientifically analyze sound. If I am looking at the wrong kind of software is there anything you can think of that would work better?
Thank you for all of your help!

[steve]

You can do some basic frequency analysis in Audacity using "Analyze menu > Plot Spectrum". This feature is much improved in the current 1.3 version of Audacity.
Audacity also has partial support for VAMP, plug-ins, though I have not used these. http://vamp-plugins.org/

For more advanced scientific analysis, have a look at:
WaveSurfer http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/
Praat http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Vamp plugins http://vamp-plugins.org/

[Trebor]

You can do some basic frequency analysis in Audacity using "Analyze menu > Plot Spectrum".
This feature is much improved in the current 1.3 version of Audacity.

Bear in mind that the frequency analysis in Audacity 1.3.11 can only process about 4 minutes maximum.
So probably not a long enough to analyse monkey howling, rat squeaking, (as you'd want to look at hours/days worth of data).

[steve]

Bear in mind that the frequency analysis in Audacity 1.3.11 can only process about 4 minutes maximum.

Yes, but the "Spectrum View" in the track drop down menu can show a continuous spectrum for the entire track.

Also, the sound activated recording could be useful.

[lily]

Thanks everyone!!! I'm going to check those other sites and see what I can do. I will let you know what I decide to do....................More questions may follow.