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Identify Bird Sounds on Your Phone
AI tools can identify bird sounds.
© Claudine Lamothe
An online tool called BirdNET uses artificial intelligence to identify bird songs and calls. And Cornell’s well-known Merlin Bird ID app now has sound ID, too. It’s as simple as opening the app, choosing “Sound ID,” and hitting record. It can pick out multiple species in the same recording.
BirdNote®
Identify Bird Sounds on Your Phone
Written by Conor Gearin
This is BirdNote.
[cell phone recording of Northern Hawk Owl]
On a morning walk with her dog Aari near Denali National Park in Alaska, Denise heard an unfamiliar bird call. She asked the dog for an opinion –
Denise: [on recording] What do you make of that noise?
– but no luck there. She recorded the mysterious screech on her phone. Uploading the sound to BirdNET, an online tool, matched the call to a Northern Hawk Owl, a medium-sized owl that lives in northern boreal forests.
[Northern Hawk Owl, ML 150433141, 0:18-0:20]
BirdNET’s creators, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz [KEM-nits] University of Technology in Germany, trained the software on thousands of bird calls and songs. BirdNET uses artificial intelligence to make an educated guess at the bird calls in any recording.
And Cornell’s well-known Merlin Bird ID app now has sound ID, too. It’s as simple as opening the app, choosing “Sound ID,” and hitting record. It can pick out multiple species in the same recording.
[Morning bird chorus, Quiet Planet QP01 0045]
These tools aren’t infallible. Some similar calls can confuse the apps, and they might not detect anything with too much background noise. Currently focused on species in North America and Europe, BirdNET is working on expanding to more regions. But already, it’s amazing to see what these AI tools can do.
[Northern Hawk Owl, ML 150433141, 0:18-0:20]
For BirdNote, I’m Ariana Remmel.
###
Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Northern Hawk Owl ML 150433141 recorded by J. Patterson.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote March 2022 October 2024 Narrator: Ariana Remmel
ID# sound-29-2022-03-10 sound-29
Conor Gearin
Writer