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An App That Helps You Hear High-Pitched Bird Songs
Tackling a common problem for aging birders.
© Hear Birds Again
For years, nature recordist Lang Elliott came up with clever ways to hear high-pitched bird songs despite his high-frequency hearing loss. Lang teamed up with a programmer to develop an app called Hear Birds Again. Currently it’s only available for iPhones, but it’s able to take high-pitch bird songs and shift them down into a lower range.
BirdNote®
An App That Helps You Hear High-Pitched Bird Songs
Written by Conor Gearin
This is BirdNote.
[Bird chorus]
For years, nature recordist Lang Elliott came up with clever ways to hear high-pitched bird songs despite his high-frequency hearing loss. Back in the ’70s, he recorded birds on tape at high speed, then played the tape back at half-speed. Slowing the songs down also lowered their pitch.
[Common Yellowthroat song at normal speed then slowed down]
Lang Elliott: And boom! Oh my god, there's, there's twice as many, three times as many birds in the forest singing now as I had perceived. There's this flood of birdsong going on, and I'm detecting a very small part of it.
Lang’s hearing loss is from a childhood accident, but many people lose their high-frequency hearing due to aging.
Lang Elliott: So there are a lot of birders who, as they get older, they start losing Grasshopper Sparrow, Cape May Warbler — especially the high warblers.
Lang teamed up with a programmer to develop an app called Hear Birds Again. Currently it’s only available for Apple devices, but it’s able to take high-pitch bird songs and shift them down into a lower range. The app works even better with a special binaural headset so that users can tell whether a sound is coming from the right or left.
Lang Elliott: Detecting a bird without any spatial element is useful, but what's fun is hearing it as if it's out there in a 3D environment — being able to point toward it, being able to actually go find it.
[Birdsong in stereo]
Learn more on our website, BirdNote dot org. I’m Jonese Franklin.
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Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Environmental ML181565 recorded by Gregory Budney, Common Yellowthroat ML247001071 recorded by Wil Hershberger, and Environmental ML163339 recorded by Matthew D. Medler.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2023 BirdNote March 2023
Narrator: Jonese Franklin
ID# elliottl-01-2024-03-01 elliottl-01
Conor Gearin
Writer