Plans for Orcasound Next
Contemplating plans for next.orcasound.net this year. Should I create a separate zulip channel and/or standup? Or start moving features to the production app live.orcasound.net?
Thesis: accessible interpretation and storytelling layer on marine audio and environmental data that allows for an integrated read of multi-dimensional conditions, in real time or in a research context
Potential partners / people I have chatted with: --
- Maritime Blue Ventures / Port of Seattle
- UW eScience Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC)
- Microsoft (Hack for Good, Microsoft Garage)
- MarineSitu (local startup doing related work with marine mammal detection for offshore energy clients)
Lower-effort goals (all front-end React/TS):
- surfacing data filters in the UI (the filtering function already exists but I don’t have a consolidated UI component built)
- building a chart that counts detections of each type of animal or sound (there is already front-end Regex that scans detection comments and pulls out keywords)
Higher effort goals (Python/FastAPI backend):
- LLM generated summaries of current filtered data state, with RAG literature references -- user can ‘chat’ by changing filters
- natural language chat interface that can run SQL queries and pull up sample data views -- user can change filters via chat
- json snapshots at regular time intervals that give averages, stats, and combined data across listeners, AI audio processing models, and visual sightings (awaiting ambient-sound-analysis metrics from Valentina’s team to fill this out more)
Low-effort features that can be applied to Live already:
- Candidates panel (right side of the map with filters and cards)
- Map data (sightings, detections per node, audible radius)
- Color theme using more of the brand palette
- Expanded mobile navigation
High-effort / high-priority – this a blocker for all other goals:
- React state management for filtering and displaying multiple data sources -- I am using Context API, but Paul needs to see a more robust solution using Zustand / Redux / etc
Features awaiting orcasound/ambient-sound-analysis repo work:
- In-browser spectrogram generation from PSD parquet files
- Candidate drawer with spectrogram (and “half height” to see underlying map view)
- Live listening drawer with spectrogram