I appreciate Teresa's posting on the most probable way to program
a computer for bird-song recognition - in terms of "voice quality" rather
than the range of possible phrases. I notice in my own birding that the
singer's voice quality is often the thing that first triggers my
recognition well before I've 'computed' whether the phrase or song fits
my song knowledge. One reason I ask friends who are new to birding and
dismayed at the idea of identifying songs, "Well, how long did it take
you to learn all your (human) friends' voices on the telephone?"


Harriet Whitehead
Anthropology WSU
whitehea at wsunix.wsu.edu