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I'm calculating soundscape indices using scikit-maad's all_temporal_alpha_indices and all_spectral_alpha_indices. I will be using them as a "screen" to help identify areas of interest in hundreds or thousands of hours of acoustic recording. So was thinking to partition the recording into 1-minute windows and calculate the indices to 1 minute at a time.

Is there a minimum duration that the functions will work well for? Is 1 minute too short?

Or even if 1 minute is fine, the last window of a file might be incomplete, i.e. not a full minute. In that case I was thinking to still calculate the indices on the shorter window, unless there's some min duration under which the indices are not meaningful.

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    $\begingroup$ I would expect 1 minute to be OK, largely because other people use that as a resolution for acoustic indices. Smaller than 1 minute doesn't allow time for very much acoustic variation, or for many acoustic events for MAAD's detections. But I haven't used MAAD myself, hence a comment rather than an answer. $\endgroup$
    – Dan Stowell ♦
    Commented Jan 27, 2023 at 8:36

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I will defer to @DanStowell's reply/comment on whether 1 minute is an OK duration.

Regarding analyzing the last minute, which may be <1 min, I would just exclude this from the data analysis since:

  • you have "hundreds or thousands of hours of acoustic recordings" (so what's it to lose 45 seconds), and
  • I don't think it's fair to compare this metric when it's been calculated on windows of varying lengths.
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    $\begingroup$ I would agree with @chloe that excluding the incomplete minutes makes sense. Some of the indices are counts of different types of events so if the denominator varies (we are assuming that each row is 1 minute long) then you lose the meaning of the counts. That is unless you know how long the last "minute" actually was and then you might be able to correct for it. This is all assuming the last recording/minute is at least, say, 30 seconds. $\endgroup$
    – Abram Fleishman
    Commented Jan 31, 2023 at 2:13

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