Birdsong Visualizer | Hacker News Reader

Birdsong Visualizer

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68 pointsssgh19 comments

I've got a raspberry pi that records birdsong at sunrise each morning here for those interested https://www.mohiohio.com Although it mostly recorded wind today. Scroll to get to another day. RSS feed available.

Cool! Do you know the species singing fairly well, or do you attempt any automated identification?

I've been dithering about getting a microphone that I could attach to my Android phone to do better at capturing quiet vocalisations (mainly thinking of that for use with Merlin. I do know the species here fairly well but still not certain of all vocalisations.)

I've been listening for a few minutes. Really beautiful. There was an alarm call close to the mic that must have been a Turdus thrush but other than that I have little idea what I'm listening to! Guess: are drongos in there?

Lots of Bellbirds in this area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_bellbird

I haven't attempted automated identification but I'd be keen to. Not sure where to start with that at the moment

I passed the audio through birdNET. Either posting onto the website at https://birdnet.cornell.edu/api/ or just running locally via https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Analyzer

Oh thanks, I'll have a play with this.

Birdnet Pi [0] is a pretty populair ready to go solution for this also

[0] https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi

Any write up how it is being done?

if you enjoy this, the Merlin bird app is pretty cool - it will show a waterfall visualization so you can see the pitch changes. it also can identify birds in real time.

What's particularly fun is that it's doing the identification by using machine vision techniques on the spectrogram. https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/2021/06/22/behind-the-scenes...

thanks, that's super cool, I had wondered about that!

I remember seeing a few years ago, maybe it was a landing page for a bird song data set, or classifier, a big grid of tiles of maybe spectrogram thumbnails of bird songs. Does anyone know what that was?

There's a link to something like that in the instructions.

Beautiful. I want to give out a recommendation for the python library librosa which can create similar visualizations (although in a cartesian space as opposed to polar coordinates)

Can't really follow the instructions on mobile, is there a video or something?

This looks cool but also not useful for ornithological purposes, right?

"Ornithology", the study of birds. How would being able to visualize birdsong patterns not be useful in bird science? What a peculiar question.

It's a scientific art.

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