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Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

macaulaylibrary.org

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#11

I'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…

There are applications that have features like this (for example ArtemiS by HEAD Acoustics). I have long wanted an open-source solution for this.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#13
post #9

The 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 b…

What specs does your birding lens have, if I may ask?

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#14
post #9

The 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 b…

Seconded. using this app made me realize the diverse ecosystem singing in the neighborhood. I’ve always enjoyed outdoors, but never really saw the point of birdwatching until this app.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#15
That's cool I've always wanted a Shazam for the outdoors ... like at night what are all the animal sounds Im hearing in the pond, while camping in the forest, etc

It could pinpoint how far away those animals are from you. Which when camping in the forest could be a good thing to warn you of a bear or another threatening animal close by..it could also listen while you sleep and wake you up if it detects something threatening semi close or close.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#16

If you like Merlin, take a look at Seek by iNaturalist.

I don't know much about Merlin's accuracy with bird calls, yet unfortunately Seek isn't enough to accurately identify plants and often leads to incorrect or overly confident (ie wrong) identifications when not enough information is available. In keying out plants, especially at the level of distinguishing species, features needed for identification often can't be gleaned from a single or even sequence of phone photos. Blooms (not always present due to seasons), internal flower or fruit structures, seasonal foliage, and features at photo incompatible scales (hairs on a leaf and also overall branching structure are hard to capture in one picture) are all common diagnostics in keys, and using neural nets biased to suggest the most commonly occurring plants leads to similar yet less common ones being misidentified.

It's a great resource for getting down to the family or sometimes even genus level, yet botany knowledge and a local or regional key/flora is really needed beyond that in most cases, unfortunately. I still think it's great for folks who otherwise would never get into botany and also raising natural awareness, yet I do worry about its impact on citizen science by giving a false sense of confidence in shaky algorithmic classifications, potentially tainting data collected for more rigorous purposes.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#17
I'll take this change to hype up BirdNET-Pi, a citizen science project where participants run a bird listening station 24/7. The results can be sent to birdweather.com. I'm always kind of shocked that I'm one of only six such stations in the Los Angeles area, and I'd love to see more people sign up.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#18
post #17

I'll take this change to hype up BirdNET-Pi, a citizen science project where participants run a bird listening station 24/7. The results can be sent to birdweather.com. I'm always kind of shocked that I'm one of only six such stations in the Los Angeles area, and I'd love to see more people sign up.

Would love to setup a station but not sure how I would protect the Pi from the elements if installed outside. Did you somehow weatherize your Pi or do you use a remote microphone over a long wire or some kind of wireless mic solution?

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#19
post #9

The 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 b…

> I blame this app for making me buy a birding lens for my camera

Haha, same thing, girlfriend installed Merlin on her phone, our walks turned into birdwatching hunts and now I’m eyeing the nice and affordable RF 100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM to make things more interesting. I’m hoping it stops at that, birding lenses are expensive.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#20

I’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.

In my experience Merlin can recognize known calls in very busy environments, like on a street with cars running, people talking and four different bird species screaming at once.
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