Orca call catalog

Southern Resident Killer Whales

This digital version of the Ford/Osborne call catalog for SRKWs is based on the 2018 Orcasound hackathon effort to generate an HTML table automatically using three sources of data:

  1. The alphanumeric name of the call and an HTML5 audio element that plays the associated sound file
  2. A spectrogram of the call signal (clipped from the original tape, with human voice excised) generated by Python
  3. A black-and-white spectogram clipped from the original catalog (Ford, 1987)
The Python script is part of the orcadata Github repo (here; the repo also contains the audio files in the expected relative directory). The resulting HTML is provided alongside the Python script, and also as a web page without edits, here.

As of September, 2020, a next goal is to add a fourth column, or additional labels in the first column, to indicate common human names that have been given by the community to the sounds, in part to help discuss and remember them. For now, select labels (favored by Scott Veirs!) have been hard-coded in by hand. Other name ideas, and a standardized nomenclature, are getting organized -- including in this Google spreadsheet of SRKW signals and statistics

S01

Commonly used by J pod

S02

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S03

S04 - "Goose honk"

S05

S06

S07 - "Oh well darn"

S09 - "Figaro"

S10 - "Squeaky balloon"

Excitement call, sommon to all types of orcas! ()

S13 - "Donkey"

S42 similarity: high-frequency component

S14

S16 - "Kitten mew"

Commonly used by K pod.

S17

S18

S19

Exclusively used by L pod.

S22

S30

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S31

S33

S34

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S35

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S36

S37

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S38

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S39

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S40

S42

High-frequency component

S44

S45

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989

S46

No spectrogram in Ford, 1989