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Merlin Bird ID

merlin.allaboutbirds.org

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31–40 of 221 posts

Re: Merlin Bird ID

#31

Post by speerer »

urban_winter wrote: post #27

Fantastic app. My wife and I are gradually becoming able to recognise more and more birds by their call. This is great because the human ear is better than the app at rejecting environmental noise - so we can spot birds by their call even close to a noisy road when the app cannot. The app, at least on my Pixel 6, struggles with very high frequency calls - e.g. long-tailed tits. My best spot yet? A nightingale in Wimb…

I feel like we share interests and location. The long-tailed tits in Wimbledon present no trouble for Merlin my Samsung phone, but I've never seen a nightingale round here.

Re: Merlin Bird ID

#33

Post by leland »

Wonderful app! Collecting birds is great fun and another fun use is to try and fool it by making my own bird noises and see if I can pass. Red-tailed hawk is my speciality. I can fool it ≈50% of the time once I’m warmed up.

Re: Merlin Bird ID

#34

Post by Arbortheus »

I’ve used this app for a while, it’s really good and I’d highly recommend it if you want to learn more about the birds where you live in an accessible way.

Re: Merlin Bird ID

#36

Post by mordechai9000 »

rjim86 wrote: post #30

I recently found this app and I'm loving it. I actively use this when i go for walk, hike and camping. Thanks team for the amazing work

Me too. I was out hiking and ran into an old guy I know. He is 90 years old and he's a bird biologist and a naturalist by vocation. I changed my plans for the day and hiked with him for a few hours. He talked quite a bit about birds and ecology and it sparked my interest. I figured someone must've made an app to id bird calls, and I found Merlin in the Google store. Now I've been walking around trying to id every bird I hear. That was a few days ago, so seeing it here on HN is definitely a Baader–Meinhof moment.

Re: Merlin Bird ID

#38

Post by EmilyHATFIELD »

eichin wrote: post #28

Of interest: > Sound ID is trained on audio recordings that are first converted to visual representations (spectrograms), then analyzed using computer vision tools similar to those that power Photo ID. Yeah, the spectrogram scrolling by at the top isn't just a cute gimmick, that's actually how the recognition works...

most audio NNs work on spectrograms

Re: Merlin Bird ID

#39

Post by colinhb »

eichin wrote: post #28

Of interest: > Sound ID is trained on audio recordings that are first converted to visual representations (spectrograms), then analyzed using computer vision tools similar to those that power Photo ID. Yeah, the spectrogram scrolling by at the top isn't just a cute gimmick, that's actually how the recognition works...

Neat.

When working in a linguistics lab as an undergraduate long ago, we looked at spectrograms to identify sounds (specifically places of articulation) as much as listened to recordings.

So it makes some sense to build a model on them rather than some other representation of the sound.

Re: Merlin Bird ID

#40

Post by JR1427 »

eichin wrote: post #28

Of interest: > Sound ID is trained on audio recordings that are first converted to visual representations (spectrograms), then analyzed using computer vision tools similar to those that power Photo ID. Yeah, the spectrogram scrolling by at the top isn't just a cute gimmick, that's actually how the recognition works...

The spectrogram is actually also really handy for manual ID, and (at least for me) in remembering calls.
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