What Are Zero-Crossing Recordings?

Rather than representing the full waveform, or shape, of sound information in the way that most conventional, full-spectrum audio recordings in any application do, zero-crossing is a compact way of representing only the most prominent frequency in a recording by noting the points in time at which a sound wave has crossed a reference amplitude a certain number of times.

Because the zero-crossing format is only able to represent one frequency at a time, full-spectrum is particularly preferable for recording multiple sources of sound simultaneously, such as multiple bats vocalizing in the same area, or a single bat in a noisy environment.

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