Inside the rainforest by Sébastien Gaxie

  • Published on 02/18/2026 by s-gaxie

Inside the Rainforest Journey through five years of tropical rainforest recordings in French Guiana. Research theme : Using immersive rainforest recordings and AI-driven sound analysis to compose a symphonic dialogue between nature and orchestra. In collaboration with the IRCAM-STMS Sound Analysis-Synthesis team and the Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle. Listening to and Analyzing Five Years of Amazon Rainforest Sounds.

➡️ This presentation is part of IRCAM Forum Workshops Paris / Enghien-les-Bains March 2026

This project explores continuous recordings collected over five years in the tropical forest of French Guiana, where automated devices capture one minute of sound every 15 minutes.
Using artificial intelligence techniques, we will analyze this vast database to identify sound patterns and uncover unexpected soundscapes of biophony.

Immersive listening to the sounds of the Guiana forest (stereo - 5 years of data / ambisonic 15 hours of data) discovery and presentation of the ecosystem.

What kind of IT environment is needed to listen to the world of tomorrow?

Four IT environments are currently being developed and adapted.

- Tinamou Rémi Mignot, analysis and synthesis team: software that allows users to move around with a sonogram every 15 minutes for 5 years below (1.5 m) and above the canopy (40 m)

- Catart Diemo Schwartz: cutting the entire 5-year database into short 2-second excerpts, which are then represented in a scatter plot organized by audio descriptors. It's like flying over the database. This software has been developed over the past 20 years at Ircam and is adapted to the challenges of ecoacoustics.

- Ecosurf: bass prospecting software using artificial intelligence. (recent Surfperch embedding) developed by Nicolas Obin's students (Sorbonne University). A sound clip of an animal is fed into the algorithm, which then searches for all similarities in the database.

- Panoramix: spatialization software for playing 3D recordings in a studio equipped with a dome and a set of around thirty speakers that recreate the space of a forest. (15 years of development at Ircam Markus Noisterning, Thibaut Carpentier, etc.)