Thousands of bird sounds visualized using Google machine learning

As a birder, this looks like a failed experiment to me. Or I don't understand what their goal was. The groupings make little sense in terms of what these species sound like. I'm guessing that's an artifact of the way they sampled the sounds, losing macro properties. Kind of like grouping the words 'paramour', 'enmity' and 'hamster' together bc they all contain /m/ sound.

Unfortunately they only hint at the envisioned application in the video and don't provide any further links, but the idea is amazing: Use sounds to monitor bio-diversity. Imagine we'd not need cameras and lots of luck to "catch" proof of an animals existence but a grid of interconnected omnidirectional microphones. We'd get real time tracking of individual animals in 3D and could have smartphones literally point the way to yet uncatalogued or even undiscovered species.

From the video, it appears this is an AI-plotted hugely multidimensional space t-sne'd onto two dimensions.

Would be interesting to do some kind of ML on how best to present hugely multidimensional spaces onto two _interactive_ dimensions. Where one AI is deciding how things are projected and how it can be manipulated, and another AI is limited to some virtual "mouse, keyboard, 2D screen" to make inferences. Such that it's optimized for faster, more correct inferences.

more like sorting bird sounds, not visualizing...

The tiny images are just spectograms/fft as far as I can tell.

edit: it's very fun though to click+drag, haha

There are some instances of the same bird in multiple locations (great horned owl). Presumably multiple recordings of the same bird. My initial reaction to them not being neighboring is to wonder about the quality of the result. Maybe better feature engineering needed to make this biologically relevant. Any other interpretations?

If you haven't already, try zooming all the way out and drawing things using the grid as a canvas.

I really want to map these to a MIDI controller

Is there a better way to pan than click-dragging 100 simultaneous bird sounds?

It would be interesting to see how similarity in bird call behavior tracks (or doesn't) the phylogenetic relationship between species. My hypothesis would be that bird calls are influenced by other birds in the same ecosystem (imitation or differentiation, and reflecting a high degree of cultural learning) rather than the null hypothesis of genetic transmission.

Interesting, spammed a few bird lovers i know with it. Though they almost all replied the recordings are not good enough.

Though personally (jk) i was slightly disappointed when i zoomed out i didn't see a big bird (or other bird) likeness.

Someone should make a Shazam/Soundhound app for bird calls, I'd definitely buy it if it could narrow it down to a subset of possibilities.

I poked around and also looked at a similar experiment, the Infinite Drum Machine: https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/drum-machine

Does anyone know what they are doing t-SNE on? i.e. are they just doing t-SNE on the raw waveforms? Or the MFCC spectrogram? Or what?

Next: add animal languages to Google Translate?

It's interesting, at the very local level I think most humans wouldn't think two adjacent bird sounds are all that similar. But if you drag along a long line and listen to a series of different birds you can "hear" a definite organized progression that seems to be organizing rhythm and major tones into groups.

Feature request: Play All

This is my cats' favorite machine learning application so far!

If you left-click and drag around on this (with short pauses), you can almost hear something that sounds very close to R2-D2.

What? No Kookaburra?

It has the most unique call of them all.

I see "Oops, sorry for the tech trouble. For the best experience, view in " for chrome on wayland...

What task is made easier by this visualization?

Wonder what it would do with a mockingbird?

It doesn't work in Firefox. How rude.

It's good to see Google in the last couple of weeks launching a bunch of [1]projects that are more in line with their mission of 'organising the world's information'.

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/google-digitizes-30...