alp-data: Bioacoustics Without the Data Wrangling
with Emma Mathies
alp-data | Datasets
17 October 2026, 16:00 GMT/ 12:00 EDT/ 09:00 PDT
alp-data: Bioacoustics Without the Data Wrangling
Bioacoustic data is growing rapidly, but working across datasets remains surprisingly difficult.
Recordings are distributed across repositories and arrive with different formats, file structures, sampling rates, metadata conventions, and licensing terms. Before researchers can train a model or run an experiment across multiple datasets, they can spend considerable time simply making the data work together.
In this lecture, Earth Species Project Senior Infrastructure Engineer Emma Mathies will introduce alp-data, an open-source Python package that provides access to more than 35+ bioacoustic datasets through one consistent interface. Spanning birds, marine mammals, primates, insects, anurans, and multi-taxon benchmarks, alp-data is the first piece of shared infrastructure for Animal Language Processing, a species-agnostic approach to using Al to study animal communication at scale.
Emma will explain why this infrastructure is needed, walk through how to get started with alp-data, and demonstrate how researchers can access, transform, stream, and combine datasets for training and evaluation. She'll also explore how shared, open infrastructure can reduce repetitive data engineering and make it easier for researchers to work across species, datasets, and scientific questions.
About the Speaker
Emma Mathies
Emma has more than eight years of experience building distributed systems and ML infrastructure at scale, most recently designing and leading infrastructure for Target's first GenAl platform. She is a co-inventor on two U.S. patents in authentication and credential systems. At Earth Species Project, she works on the data and infrastructure foundations that support bioacoustic research. Her independent technical interests include memory systems for persistent agents and the geometry of learned representations. Outside of ESP, she builds Farol, a public-interest geospatial platform serving Mexico City, where she lives.
