Hi All. Are there any Australian Bird apps which identify bird calls or songs in the field. ie which “hear” the vocalisations and can identify the species which is calling? Cheers Michael
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There’s always the option of recording a call and uploading it somewhere like soundcloud, xeno-canto, etc, and asking here for opinions. Peter Shute Sent from my iPad
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At the moment, the best technology for birdsong recognition is the wetware between our ears. Carl Clifford
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On 15/10/2014 4:44 PM, Martin Butterfield wrote: Shazam is surprisingly good (e.g. identifying torturous muzak on the PA while your flight is sitting at the gate awaiting departure) – but birds don’t restrict themselves to the 88 notes of the piano. An algorithm to hash* (“fingerprint”) bird calls to something manageable would be worthy of a Nobel Prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function — -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Paul Taylor Veni, vidi, tici – birder@ozemail.com.au I came, I saw, I ticked.
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On 15/10/2014 4:44 PM, Martin Butterfield wrote: Of course there are orders of magnitude more people loading their music into their devices than birdos loading calls. But a short list rather than an absolute ID would enable you do do your call-matching much more readily. Until you came up against one of the many excellent mimics. Brian Fleming
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Hi All, Actually, I’m not sure your response is entirely accurate, Allan. There is a project by the University of Wisconsin called “WeBird” that is designed to do exactly this. You can capture the sound of birds calling using the microphone on your iPhone, and the software will tell you the species of bird. Or so the blurb goes… http://grow.cals.wisc.edu/environment/smart-birding I am not sure how close WeBird is to commercialisation – it was slated for release in 2013, but I haven’t seen or heard anything about whether this date was met. There is a free download of an iPhone app, but it hasn’t been updated since 2011, so you’d have to wonder if it has been abandoned. I suspect, though, that in many respects, Allan’s response is accurate. The way that the music recognition app Shazam and similar work on the iPhone and similar devices is that they take a sample of the music playing (even humming and whistling) and compress this into a small amount of data that can then be compared with a vast library of captured and recorded tunes. Once a subset of the vast library has been identified, larger data samples are compared until a match is found (or not). What makes all of this work is two things fundamentally: a HUGE library of sampled songs and a HUGE array of servers with incredibly high performance. What is likely missing in the birding world is both of these – there is no huge library of sampled bird song and I suspect that the University of Wisconsin and any other birder-related organisation is unlikely to have the funds to afford a huge array of fast servers needed for the data processing. Interestingly, the variety of calls wouldn’t matter greatly as the software uses an averaging approach – tightening the parameters to do with the averaging would simply mean that a closer match was required, or relaxing the parameters would allow for more matches (and more likelihood of erroneous matches). I think that it is likely that we will have apps that can do this in the reasonably near future provided that a large enough sample set of calls becomes available – the servers and hardware will be cheap enough in time as computing power doubles approximately every 18 months – and prices probably halve in the same time period! Paul Dodd Docklands, Victoria —–Original Message—– Allan Richardson Sent: Wednesday, 15 October 2014 3:27 PM Cc: birding-aus-request@birding-aus.org Hi Michael, The short answer is no. What you’d like and what technology can provide in this case are miles apart. There is a recording device available that records bird calls and has software for reading the calls. However, you have to record, identify and then build a library of calls for the software to identify. However the technology is not reliable for a number of reasons, and the number of call variations you would require to cover Australia’s avi-fauna is beyond computation. The software has difficulty in identifying the calls, due to variation in intensity, pitch, shape and other noises masking the calls, so finding a good set of “standard calls” that the software could recognise would be difficult. Not only that, in any given area you may have as many as 200 or more birds that could be possible, and this multiplied by the number of call variations and loudness would be very difficult for software to work out. Hopefully a new way of deciphering calls will become available, but at the moment it doesn’t exist. The ability of the human ear and brain to identify the calls of birds is very difficult to emulate in the electronic world, due to the often subtle variation between species and within species vocalisations. I wish the answer could be of more help – the best thing to do is get out, hear a bird call and then track it down and identify it. Yes it’s slow and time consuming, and often frustrating, but these problems are what makes bird identification so rewarding in the long-run. Happy birding, Allan Richardson On 15 Oct 2014, at 10:28 am, Michael Hunter < drmhunter@westnet.com.au> wrote: songs in the field. ie which “hear” the vocalisations and can identify the species which is calling?
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I find this intriguing and suspect that Allan’s answer is completely accurate *if* you wish to identify every bird that one hears, I have put that qualification because of my use of a Software app for iPad (Shazam) that can listen to about 30 seconds of a piece of music and identify it in many cases. It isn’t very good on classical music but on pop and the sort of music on ABC Classic FM Drive my guess is that it is correct at least 90% of the time. My guess is that there are several orders of magnitude more CDs around than there are species of birds in Australia (especially if seabirds are excluded). Of course some birds have many different calls (without worrying about mimicry). But my guess is that matching a pretty high proportion (lets say 80% as a guess) of calls recorded in the bush to an authoritative source (eg the BOCA tapes or a selection of Xeno-Canto calls) would basically be quite achievable. The feeling I get from coverage of this issue by a North American researcher is that he wasn’t game to proceed until he had got to a situation of about 99% matching. In other words the choice was perfection or nothing. I don’t have the kit or knowledge to try this, but suspect that if a greater level of “no match” was accepted something could be done quite readily that would be way more useful in the field than the sample calls in (for example the Morcom App.). Martin Martin Butterfield http://franmart.blogspot.com.au/
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Hi Michael, There is definitely work being done on the issue but whether it becomes an ‘app’ in the near-future is another matter. If you go to the Bioacoustic Workbench Site you might find some interesting projects. A couple of years back we had to ‘tag’ hundreds of SE Qld bird-calls for the purpose of ‘voice-recognition’ but I don’t know how far the QUT team have got with this, at the current time my involvement is mainly with discovering the calls of species on the sensors to note their ‘presence’ in a particular area. This is a ‘community-driven’ concept and I’m sure they would welcome your involvement if you contacted them. Regards, Tom — ******************************** Tom Tarrant Hawthorn East 3123 Victoria http://www.aviceda.org ********************************
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Hi Michael, The short answer is no. What you’d like and what technology can provide in this case are miles apart. There is a recording device available that records bird calls and has software for reading the calls. However, you have to record, identify and then build a library of calls for the software to identify. However the technology is not reliable for a number of reasons, and the number of call variations you would require to cover Australia’s avi-fauna is beyond computation. The software has difficulty in identifying the calls, due to variation in intensity, pitch, shape and other noises masking the calls, so finding a good set of “standard calls” that the software could recognise would be difficult. Not only that, in any given area you may have as many as 200 or more birds that could be possible, and this multiplied by the number of call variations and loudness would be very difficult for software to work out. Hopefully a new way of deciphering calls will become available, but at the moment it doesn’t exist. The ability of the human ear and brain to identify the calls of birds is very difficult to emulate in the electronic world, due to the often subtle variation between species and within species vocalisations. I wish the answer could be of more help – the best thing to do is get out, hear a bird call and then track it down and identify it. Yes it’s slow and time consuming, and often frustrating, but these problems are what makes bird identification so rewarding in the long-run. Happy birding, Allan Richardson On 15 Oct 2014, at 10:28 am, Michael Hunter < drmhunter@westnet.com.au> wrote:
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