For the 400+ sounds that Merlin (the user-friendly, offline-functional sister app to BirdNET) can now identify with 80-90% accuracy, it took a team of dozens of bird sound ID experts several years to annotate tens of thousands of individual audio spectrograms. On average, they needed about 1,000 recordings per species). Here is a bit more about how they did it: https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/2021/06/22/behind-the-scenes...

Great recommendation, thanks a lot!

I agree. And also I actually realized a large part of the issue here might also be other background noises adding .. ahem.. noise to the samples.

Because in nature, it's almost never just one bird you hear. You hear it in the context of all the other sounds.

True, but Shazam is a testament to what's achievable even without audio source separation. Even going back about 10 years when I first tried it, I was kind of stupefied that it managed to work in a noisy department store.

But in some sense Shazam has it very easy - it is working from a discrete set of specific audio recordings, not, say, the set of artists, or the set of songs. Shazam is useless for live performances, or covers (by different band) of songs (unless those specific recordings are also in Shazam's database). Birdnet is tackling the problem of trying to get some essential properties of one species' song (and each bird is a new live performance, by a different cover artist).

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?

Google assistant does this. You can hum a song, or sing and it will recognize it with decent accuracy. Though humming camp town races lead me to this gem... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFFykQIrPCk

Never heard of Midomi, but your description reminds me of Soundhound

As I understand it there are even sub-dialects for each of these bird calls/songs. The example shared with me was compared to the English language in the U.S. where you would expect to hear stark differences in the southern states vs the New England area with a greeting like: "hey ya'll".

Unfortunately/fortunately I can't get the visual out of my head of a southern speaking crow looking for trash near my house now.....

There is cultural transmission between animals too. Like here is some whale song spreading from Australia out into the Pacific.

https://youtu.be/P99CR4y-TYw

She looks like she is delighted btw.

Plus, so many birds will improvise their songs, pulling parts of other birds' songs into their songs. And many will even outright imitate other birds (not only parrots, but corvids and some others). Many amateur birders like me often cannot tell imitations from the real ones.

A couple of years ago, my wife had been practising a particular piece of music on the violin for some time in preparation for an exam; after a while, she noticed that the blackbird in our garden began using the opening few bars as part of its song.

I tested the app on one of our more interesting mimics (tooth billed bowerbird, endemic to the area) .. without great results. It is however very successful in identifying much of the morning cacophony here. This is for far north Queensland, Australia where we have a fairly decent array of resident songbirds.

This is actually a pretty difficult problem. I have been trying to learn bird songs for a very long time and it is pretty difficult. Saying that a bird has 3-4 bird sounds is an extreme simplification.

> I had this idea as well, but as you start to build the app you quickly realize that each bird doesn't just have one sound, but many sounds and trying to do this accurately takes much more effort than you're probably expecting.

Effort? Not really so much (stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.)

Data? Yes. Lots and lots of data.

And some birds can mimic voices, for example blackbirds and jays. They often impersonate other birds, or cats.