Thank you for helping make it easy to listen for whales and conserve marine life!

Orcasound is an open source community designing and developing software and hardware to support ocean conservation and bioacoustic research. We are a broad group of scientists, teachers, hackers, software professionals, UX researchers, designers, and program managers. We often work together through weekend hackathons, but also collaborate over longer periods through weekly stand-ups and multi-week educational efforts, like Google Summer of Code.

Our physical roots are in the critical habitat of Southern Resident Killer Whales where we maintain a network of underwater microphones (hydrophones) near Seattle (WA, USA) that lets us listen 24/7 for orca calls, clicks, and whistles. We also hear marine noise pollution sources, like commercial ships and recreational boats, that can impact the orca's ability to communicate, navigate and hunt.

We are hard at work building a suite of deployed web applications, open source software, open hardware, and open data repositories with both raw and labeled audio and related information. Our live-listening web app lets users experience the soundscape of the orcas and tag audio data as community scientists. The same live streams are monitored by machine learning models which can detect killer whale calls. Together humans and AI can notify the network and other stewards when orcas are present, allowing dynamic mitigation of threats they face.

Your sponsorship will accelerate our work. From 2017-2022, almost all of our successes were accomplished through heroic voluntary efforts. We're proud of what we've built and how are volunteers have leveraged Orcasound into novel resumes and exciting interview topics, but we admit the process has been slow sometimes. Through strategic funding of high-priority tasks in our user-centered design and development cycle, we'll more efficiently improve our software and hardware solutions for the good of open source and the oceans.