I was recently invited to visit Ewha Womens University in Seoul, South Korea, to attend an acoustic symposium they had put together. I arrived on the 3rdof October and on the 4thI gave a seminar presentation to one of their courses on the ecology and acoustics of the amphibian community on Mount Kinabalu. The afternoon was spent with Proj. Yikweon Jang’s research group talking about acoustics and going over some analysis methods of acoustic data. Over the weekend I spent some time hiking up one of the mountains in Seoul with some of the lab members, including being shown the river which runs through the city. It used to be an underground river with a road over it and nothing thriving in it, but a few years ago they decided to remove the road and have now worked on making the river alive again and the pathways seem to be appreciated by the Seoul citizens to walk along. The symposium started on the 7thstarted, I was very excited as Prof. Jerome Seuer from the Natural History Museum in Paris was coming, he has written or been involved with the majority of acoustic packages in R so it was great to finally meet a person that is so influential in your everyday work life. Jerome presented on Ecoacoustics, I presented on our acoustic system and the information we can get out of our monitoring data, Dr Tzu-Hao Lin presented on clustering and marine acoustics, Dr Kyong Seok Ki presented on some of the work done in South Korea on impact of airports on acoustic landscape amongst others, Dr Ming-Feng Chuang presented on acoustic components of an amphibian species and Dr Hortense Serret talked about citizen science and acoustic data collection. It was a great symposium as everyone was working on very different things and using the data in different ways so it truly demonstrated the wide range of applications of soundscape data. I also attended a workshop the day after by Dr Tzu-Hao Lin on analyzing long-term spectrograms. It was a fantastic trip and I learnt a lot as well as having a great time finding out about the research conducted in Prof Jang’s lab, so I am very grateful to him for inviting me. The university itself have beautiful grounds which are surprisingly calm considering the amount of students and how busy Seoul is! Another thing that was great was that I got to meet up with an old friend, I met Dr Ming-Feng Chuang in Taiwan in 2014 when I visited his lab– since then we have met once or twice at a conference but it was great to see that he is doing so well in South Korea.
