The Orchive

[Steven Ness <>]

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to a large archive of bioacoustic recordings, primarily of Northern Resident Orca Whales (Killer Whales), but also consisting of other whales, dolphins and marine mammals, called "The Orchive" which can be accessed at: http://orchive.cs.uvic.ca

 It contains approximately 20,000 hours of recordings, recorded at OrcaLab (http://orcalab.org) a land based research station founded by Dr. Paul Spong.  Our lab at the University of Victoria in collaboration with OrcaLab has digitized all the tape recordings and have made them available for access by the scientific community at http://orchive.cs.uvic.ca.  

You can also download all the recordings directly from http://data.orchive.net in raw 44.1kHz .wav format.  This collection of recordings is over 9 terabytes in size, and all recordings can be downloaded in their full raw format.

In addition, we have a number of other scientific resources available for this dataset, including a full call catalogue based on Dr. John Ford's Northern Resident call catalogue.  We have also scanned approximately 30,000 lab book pages containing a considerable amount of behavioural and acoustic information entered by the researchers at OrcaLab.  These can be accessed through the Orchive website.  

In addition, using the Orchive Interface, 10 scientists and volunteers have made approximately 17,000 annotations of different vocalizations, these annotations are also available for direct download at http://data.orchive.net

I just recently defended my Ph.D. in Computer Science with the subject being the Orchive, in which I describe a computer based system I developed for the annotation and analysis of these vocalizations. I present results on audio feature extraction and machine learning classification of these vocalizations and show that using advanced algorithms, we can classify orca vocalizations with good accuracy.  You can access my Ph.D. thesis at: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/5109

If you have any questions about this project, or need help in accessing our data, please feel free to contact me at

Best regards,

Steven Ness.