1. Classifying acoustic units is often a key step in studying repertoires and sequence structure in animal communication.  Manual classification by eye and ear remains the primary method, but new tools and techniques are urgently needed to expedite the process for large, diverse datasets.

2. Here we introduce Koe, an application for classifying and analysing animal vocalisations. Koe offers bulk-labelling of units via interactive ordination plots and unit tables, as well as visualisation and playback, segmentation, measurement, data filtering/exporting and new tools for analysing repertoire and sequence structure—in an integrated environment.

3. We demonstrate Koe with a real-world case study of New Zealand bellbird Anthornis melanura songs from an archipelago metapopulation. Having classified 21,500 units in Koe, we compare repertoires and sequence structure between sites and sexes.

4. Koe is web-based (koe.io.ac.nz) and easy to use, making it ideal for collaboration, education and citizen science. By enabling large-scale, high-resolution classification and analysis of animal vocalisations, Koe expands the possibilities for bioacoustics research.

For details on dataset collection and processing, please see the paper this dataset accompanies.

Koe bioacoustics software is open source. Source code is accessible at github.com/fzyukio/koe

The Koe user manual is available at https://github.com/fzyukio/koe/wiki

The Case Study tutorial associated with the paper is available at https://github.com/fzyukio/koe/wiki/Analysis-Tutorial:-Case-Study-of-NZ-bellbird-song  

There are two zip files uploaded here:

"Tutorial_NZbellbirds_Song_Files.zip" provides song recordings from New Zealand bellbirds (Anthornis melanura) in WAV format for users of Koe to test uploading, segmenting, and classifying acoustic units as they follow along with the user manual.

"Koe_Bellbirds_Tutorial_Dataset.zip" comprises acoustic unit label data, to allow users to reproduce the Case Study in the paper. Download this zip and import into Koe following the step-by-step instructions in  https://github.com/fzyukio/koe/wiki/Analysis-Tutorial:-Case-Study-of-NZ-bellbird-song.