Animal Sound Archive
The Animal Sound Archive contains around 120,000 recordings of birds, mammals and other animal groups. As one of the oldest collections of its kind in the world, it serves the purposes of research, documentation and the long-term preservation of acoustic biodiversity.
Overview
Our animal sound archive is one of the oldest of its kind and the third-largest bioacoustic collection in the world. It comprises over 120,000 sound recordings of around 1,800 bird species, 580 mammal species and numerous species from other animal groups, including fish, amphibians, reptiles and insects.
A third of the recordings were made in the wild, whilst two-thirds were produced in zoological institutions or under experimental conditions. The field recordings originate predominantly from Central and Eastern Europe, though original recordings from every continent are now represented.
The collection continues to grow steadily, partly thanks to contributions from dedicated citizen scientists who make their recordings available.
Contact
Dr Karl-Heinz Frommolt
Scientific Head of Collection
Email: tsa@mfn.berlin
Telephone: +49 30 889140-8640
Access
The recordings can be accessed via the Animal Sound Archive database, which already contains over 40,000 audio files.
A significant proportion consists of animal sounds that were recorded predominantly using magnetic tape technology up until the 1990s. These have been digitised at a resolution of 96 kHz and 24-bit for long-term preservation. The Animal Sound Archive is therefore now a fully digital collection. New recordings are produced exclusively in digital format.
The scientific director of the Animal Sound Archive is available to answer research enquiries.
History
The recording of animal sounds has a long tradition in Berlin. As early as the 1930s, Oskar Heinroth (1871–1945) and Ludwig Koch (1881–1974) released the first records featuring bird calls, including ‘Gefiederte Meistersänger – Das erste tönende Lehr- und Hilfsbuch zur Beobachtung und Bestimmung der heimischen Vogelwelt’ (Feathered Master Singers – The First Audio Guide and Handbook for Observing and Identifying Native Birdlife).
The Berlin behavioural biologist Günter Tembrock (1918–2011) founded the Animal Sound Archive. From 1951 onwards, he systematically recorded animal sounds, initially of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), which he kept for his bioacoustic research at the Institute of Zoology at Humboldt University. Between 1952 and 1966, he recorded 345 audio tapes on the acoustic communication of foxes, with a total running time of over 20 hours.
In the mid-1950s, recordings from the two Berlin zoos were added to the collection. These provided an essential basis for Tembrock’s work on the acoustic behaviour of mammals. From 1960 onwards, he used portable recording equipment to systematically record animal sounds in the wild, initially in Berlin and Brandenburg.
In 1963, Tembrock published the anthology ‘Acoustic behaviour of animals’. In 1967, the record ‘Waldvögel’ was released by VEB Deutsche Schallplatte (Eterna) as part of the series ‘Stimmen der Vögel Mitteleuropas’, which he compiled together with Michael Schubert and which found widespread use in amateur ornithology.
In the following decades, researchers expanded the archive with international recordings, including those by Dieter Wallschläger (Mongolia, 1979 and 1983) and Ulrich Lundberg (Antarctica, 1981/82).
The Animal Sound Archive has been part of our research collection since 1995. Since then, research projects and the acquisition of estates, such as those of Klaus Conrads, Erwin Tretzel and Gerhardt Thielcke, have continuously expanded the collection.
Research
The Animal Sound Archive serves as a foundation for bioacoustic and ethological research. In addition to traditional questions regarding animal acoustic communication, the monitoring of ecosystems is becoming increasingly important. Long-term recordings make it possible to detect changes in species communities acoustically, even in hard-to-access habitats.
A key focus is on the development and application of digital methods for analysing animal sounds. Advances in signal processing and pattern recognition are increasingly enabling automated methods for species identification.
The archive provides a reference database of high-quality recordings, which is used both for comparative studies and for experimental approaches such as playback experiments. In these experiments, researchers investigate animals’ reactions to the calls of their conspecifics.
The collection is available to researchers worldwide and is used both internally and internationally.