TACOST: Test ACOustic Tracking

For more on this package see the detailed documentation here

tacost allows you to test and characterise the accuracy of your acoustic tracking system. It allows you to create audio recordings to simulate sound emission from known points of your choice, and uncover the maximum expected accuracy of your acoustic tracking system.

What TACOST does

• Creates audio files which simulate sound arrival at each microphone in an array from user-specified points

• Allows customisation of multiple parameters that may affect acoustic tracking accuracy

What TACOST does not do

• Perform the actual acoustic tracking. You need to use a separate system (eg. TOADSuite, Batalef, or the tracking system of your choice)

• Simulate complex sound propagation (reflection, reverberation,etc). Sound is assumed to travel in straight line paths. In version 0.0.1 there's no spherical spreading too!

About the logo

The two T's in the logo are tristar arrays (shaped like T's) with four microphones each on them (blue dots). The red dots are positions from where sound was emitted. In this case, I like to imagine it to be a bat's calls as it flew past two arrays!

Getting started

Creating an audio file to test your system is as simple as opening up your shell/command line and typing:

python -m tacost -run_example

The command above will generate a four channel WAV file with 500 kHz sampling rate based on the default array geometry and source positions. See the page on default array geometry and source position.

Installation

tacost is currently pre-PyPi and it'll be some time before you can pip install tacost! However, you can use :code:tacost with a local install! Head here and download the repo. From the downloaded repo open up a shell/prompt and type pip install ./.