A trained musician can look at a musical score and imagine the sound of an entire orchestra. The score is a visual representation of the sounds. In an analogous way, we can represent birdsong by an image, and analysis of the image can tell us the species of bird singing. This is what happens with Merlin Bird ID. In a recent episode of Mooney Goes Wild, Niall Hatch of Birdwatch Ireland interviewed Drew Weber of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a developer of Merlin Bird ID. This phone app enables a large number of birds to be identified [TM237 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Continue reading ‘Making Sound Pictures to Identify Bird Songs’