Download any of the existing bird apps that help you recognize birds by their sound and you'll see that each bird often has 3-4 distinct sounds, each of them different, and these are just partial examples.
You'd have to be extremely dedicated (and very good at machine learning) to see this idea through to completion.
Because in nature, it's almost never just one bird you hear. You hear it in the context of all the other sounds.
There used to be an an app called Midomi (I think?) that could identify songs by humming or you singing, which was cool, but then I vaguely remember it rebranding itself and being less useful. Does anyone else know of a song-recognition app that is more like BirdNet and less like Shazam?
Unfortunately/fortunately I can't get the visual out of my head of a southern speaking crow looking for trash near my house now.....
She looks like she is delighted btw.
Effort? Not really so much (stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.)
Data? Yes. Lots and lots of data.
https://www.appbrain.com/app/birdnet-bird-sound-identificati...
I think I had someone in my class (about 10 years ago) attempting this as a project.
What if you used the AI hardware in the phone to do the audio recognition?
For efficiency you could even use geolocation and figure out which species are found in a location and download a model just for those. Anything not matched could be uploaded as before.
When the Lab’s researchers conceived of BirdNET, there were no reliable bird sound identification tools. BirdNET was built as a rapid prototype, engaging computer science students to build an app for that users to test the machine learning algorithms. BirdNET proved to be a research breakthrough and by 2020 was performing with far better accuracy than five other apps tested.
That success opened the way to apply computer vision to sound identification in the Lab’s outreach and education app, Merlin.
Merlin offers OFFLINE functionality, and multiple ways to help identify birds, including through a user describing the bird, taking a photo of the bird, and now recording a bird song or call. Merlin Bird ID is integrated with the Lab’s systems and resources, including updated taxonomy, bird information from eBird and Birds of the World, rich media from the Macaulay Library, life list building tools integrated with eBird, and more.
Some birds in my locale mostly repeat themselves, but some seem to have 'vocabularies' of 3-5 different calls, and you can hear pitch and timing inflections within those - might be just random variation in combination with different calls it might yield 30-60 'words'. Sometimes I've been sitting under a tree and heard what seemed to start out as a conversation that degenerated into an argument followed by a physical fight.
Even crows seem to have distinct patterns/variations in their cawing, and given what we know about their tool-using abilities I'm curious to know how they use their voices. I've seen remarkable behaviors like a group of crows harassing a falcon to interfere with its pursuit of a smaller songbird.
The benefit of using hardware accelerated ML built into the phone is that it’s much more lower power. It’s designed for continuous use cases (“Hey Alexa” or Hey Siri). So you don’t have to turn the recording on and off and miss the bird call.
I don’t know if continuous monitoring can be used by third party apps. But having it on all the time, with geolocation would be amazing. You could set alerts etc.
If you could use multiple phones to locate the bird in 3space that would be neat. Then you could tell people where to point their cameras. Maybe a standalone IoT monitoring device could be placed in forests to count each and every bird. This is the future.
This is actually the 'real' research motivation behind the bird classification work: Slap a microphone to the side of a tree, pick it up in a month, and get some accurate picture of what species have been in the area.
Birds are relatively easy to observe, thanks to their vocalizations, which makes them an indicator species. We have a good idea what many species eat, so they end up telling you quite a lot about the surrounding ecosystem.
However, it turns out that the 'soundscape problem' where the microphone is just attached to a tree is a bit more difficult than identifying foreground birds only, using a device that can be pointed in the relevant direction by the user.
We've been encouraging further work on the soundscape problem by hosting the BirdCLEF and Kaggle competitions, and have been seeing steady progress. Improvements in the 'hard' soundscape problem have been driving improvements in the 'consumer' identification algorithms.
https://www.kaggle.com/c/birdclef-2021/overview
[source: I've been working with the BirdNet folks on and off for the last few years, and co-host the Kaggle competitions.]
Yes pointing a directional mic introduces a whole new set of mechanical challenges.
Maybe you could build an irregular grid of omnidirectional microphones and use signal processing to direct the beam digitally (similar to radio beam-forming). Now you’ll need more processing horsepower to do FFTs to do phase shifts. Although if you assume the bird calls only occupy discrete frequencies you might be able to save some computation by just computing those.
Perhaps a machine learning model could be trained that does all of this for you. Then you get the benefit of hardware acceleration. Some ML chips can handle DSP tasks.
The quality of the single-source classifier is the obvious scientific bottleneck, though; improve it, and everything else will work better. (We've also got plenty* of existing training data for this case.) So that's where we've been focusing most of the energy.
* - depending on species, of course. See also: xeno-canto.org
It would be amazing if BirdNet eventually supported offline.
The only thing she'd improve was exactly what you mentioned: offline recognition! (and also keeping the bird sound recordings to export them later)
Listening to bird sounds is now recognized to have positive impact on mental health[1], So how about selecting a particular region on the earth and listing to high quality bird sounds? There some good YT playlists[2] but a separate service could be more functional, Tie up with bird zoos to do it live, share a piece of revenue for conservation and you'll have my subscription.
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-listening-to-bird-song-ca...
So when she read about this a few weeks ago, she literally smacked me for not building it. Now if I tell her it's on the front page of Hacker News AND everyone here loves the idea even more, I'm going to get another, harder smack because she knows how HN is full of others like me!
(yes I'm aware that this community more than others will agree that ideas by themselves are a dime a dozen, but nonetheless, it would've been a really fun project)