Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
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Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#2(2021)
Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#3Did HN destroy the site? When I click all I see is "Bad Gateway".
Anyway, I use the app and find it helpful. I'm astonished that the microphone on my cell phone is sensitive enough to pick up birds up in the trees.
Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#4I use the app daily. I would like to know how it works. And I get the bad gateway msg as well.
Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#5I've always thought that these apps are missing a feature-set: Manipulation of the sound clip prior to identification. In both this app and BirdNET the selection always selects from the lowest recorded frequency to the highest -- I would like to be able to select the frequency band I'm interested in. Maybe first select time, then put corners on the rectangle to be shaped. The sound file passed to the identifier would appear cropped such that the unselected region is totally silent to the identifier. I am often trying to identify an owl or other lower-registered bird but it is unidentifiable because of noisy crickets/cicadas.
Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#6Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#7So, very different from the Shazam/Abracadabra post from the other day. It's a different technique. It would be nice to get a comparison.
Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#8So funny to see this! I've had the pleasure of working with Grant (one of the lead researchers on Merlin Sound ID) on other porjects in the past! The whole team is kind-hearted and incredibly smart. Sound ID is one of the very few research projects that make me instantly smile hearing about in the news.
I've always been impressed with the responsibility that the Cornell Lab and Macaulay Library give toward involving people (citizen scientists, raters, and experts alike) in the curation of the data they use. This isn't an application where "hoovering up the entire Internet" is the right thing to do; it's a case where those hand-tweaked parameters make all the difference. A considerable amount of thought is given to every sound sample, and every person in the pipeline's working incredibly hard.
Hats off the team to publishing more about the internal process!
Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#9The Merlin app has transformed my nature/photo walks, and got me interested in birds.
I never realized how many unique birds I was hearing as I’d walk through an area until I turned this app on. It opened a whole new awareness, and helped me remember which bird calls go with which species.
There’s also something incredibly cool and satisfying and beautiful about the resulting spectrograms. Watching the shape of the bird call appear visually in realtime really changed my experience of listening.
I blame this app for making me buy a birding lens for my camera, which had previously been used primarily for landscapes/cityscapes. I highly recommend giving it a try.
Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)
#10I’ve tried this a couple times but can’t get it to work because the bird song Im interested in is never the only sound in the environment.