ORCHIVE: Digitizing and Analyzing Orca Vocalizations

This paper describes the process of creating a large digital archive of killer whale or orca vocalizations. The goal of the project is to digitize approximately 20000 hours of existing analog recordings of these vocalizations in order to facilitate access to researchers internationally. We are also developing tools to assist content-based access and retrieval over this large digital audio archive. After describing the logistics of the digitization process we describe algorithms for denoising the vocalizations and for segmenting the recordings into regions of interest. It is our hope that the creation of this archive and the associated tools will lead to better understanding of the acoustic communications of Orca communities worldwide.