Phonotheca

The Animal Bioacoustic Collection (Phonotheca) was created in the Zoological Museum in 2011, and it was initiated from the animal sound records collected by Svetlana Gogoleva, an employee of the Museum, during a series of expeditions in Vietnam. The main purpose of the collection is the same as that of other museum collections: accumulation, preservation, study, and display of information about the wildlife diversity. This makes it an important and quite organic part of the modern research museum.

At the beginning of 2023, the Bioacoustics Collection contains more than 3,000 records of animal sounds made under natural conditions in different geographical regions, primarily in Russia and Vietnam. It includes records of the voices of more than 250 species of birds, 25 species of amphibians and reptiles, 20 species of mammals, and 80 species of insects. The collection contains rare and unique records, including the ones of several new amphibian species. Each audio record in the Collection is checked and processed “manually”, and it is accompanied by detailed information about location, recording time, and other data that may be useful to scientists in research. Each record in the Collection is valuable for its uniqueness and serves as an important source of information for anyone who is engaged in biology or interested in the animal world.

Completing the Collection is carried out mainly by the staff of the Zoological Museum but also by other professional zoologists who study particular animal taxa in this respect. With this, the Collection curators welcome everyone who may wish to contribute to the preservation of the sounds of nature in our Museum. The Animal Bioacoustics Collection is maintained by specialists who monitor the quality of audio records and ensure their proper storage, cataloguing, and processing. 

Curators of the Collection not only gather and store audio data, but also conduct research on various aspects of bioacoustics. They investigate the structure of sounds and the ways of producing different kinds thereof, describe the repertoire of species and the role of sounds in animal behavior, contribute to identification of new species, analyze geographical variability of audio signals, assess ecological conditions and biodiversity of natural communities, etc. In addition, audio records are also involved in such important areas as nature conservation, education, and popularization of natural science by providing museums and zoos with sound records, publishing them on websites and DVDs, and also in the production sector, including pest control and scaring birds in the certain places (such as airports).

The Museum welcomes everyone who may wish to contribute to the development of its Animal Bioacoustic Collection by donating the animal sound records accompanied by as complete and precise as possible information about species allocation of the animals having produced the recorded sounds, the latter’s biological contexts (alarm, mating, etc.), where and where they were recorded, the certain technical parameters of the recording, and any other useful information about both the records themselves and the conditions in which they were made.