Toolbox for synthesis of underwater recordings
Bram Cuyx, Clea Parcerisas, Elisabeth Debusschere, and Thomas Dietzen (2026)
Summary
Marine soundscapes contain valuable information about local ecosystems, making comprehensive analysis of their constituent events essential for accurately assessing ecosystem health. However, they are subject to high levels of continuous noise, hindering our ability to disentangle these events and analyse the soundscape.
One approach to mitigate noise is the use of a noise reduction front-end. However, as noise reduction algorithms alter the input distribution to embedding networks, applying them carefully is essential.
At the same time, appropriate tools to synthesise marine acoustic recordings at controlled signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) are currently not available. In this paper, we introduce an open toolbox for synthesis of recordings aimed at evaluating noise reduction front-ends.