Hearing the heat: soil probe recordings of rapid organic decomposition (150 x 10 min)

Audio recordings from a proof-of-concept study of sound during rapid organic decomposition. 150 recordings of 10 min each (mono, 16-bit, 48 kHz) were made with a piezoelectric soil probe in five buckets (A-E) of vermicompost and hay. The buckets were recorded at 31 occasions between 27 June and 12 July 2026, covering one heating-cooling cycle (internal temperature 28 to 39 to 26 °C). The data set contains one zip file per bucket (30 recordings each), ten featured example recordings for science communication and teaching (not part of the paper analysis), and two CSV files with the recording metadata (crop positions, recorder start times) and the internal temperatures per occasion. The recordings are not calibrated and carry no sound-event labels. See README.md for file names and the recording setup. The data accompany the article "Hearing the heat: a proof-of-concept study of nonlinear sound measures for distinguishing phases of rapid organic decomposition". The analysis code is archived separately (see related identifiers). Licence: CC BY 4.0.