Hi Jeremiah and Tweets.

Shazam for Birdwatchers: it's in the works now. "WeBIRD" has been mentioned
a couple times on Tweeters already but it's slated for release soon:
http://grow.cals.wisc.edu/environment/smart-birding (gives you an idea
about the technology behind it, I guess they missed the spring 2012 launch
date).

No matter how it splices the song and queries the database, I will be
curious to see (and a bit skeptical about) how it will "hear" the song.
You'd either need a very sensitive (and directional) microphone on your
phone or would need to be very close to the mystery bird for this work.
Otherwise, the signal-to-noise ratio would be too high and it wouldn't be
able to hear the mystery song vs. the American Robin singing boisterously
behind it, or the House Finch calling behind you, or the passing car,
etc... etc...

Shazam works best when you hold the phone close to the speaker. If the
music is distant, or someone is talking in the foreground, it has trouble
returning a "hit" in the database.

Either way, I am excited to see how this works. Plus, I hope that they have
some European species in their database!

Adam

-------

Adam Sedgley
P a r i s, France
sedge.thrasher [at] gmail [dot] com
http://www.flockingsomewhere.com


On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Jeremiah Alexander <
jkalexan at u.washington.edu> wrote:

> While the idea of an app that can identify birdsong by listening to them,
> much like the app Shazam for music, I suspect it will be a long time before
> such technology is available. My understand is that Shazam doesn't
> actually recognize the song, but rather a string of 0's and 1's running in
> a continuous loop during the song - so it can recognize CDs and MP3s, but I
> suspect it'd be unsuccessful with records or casettes. Cool in its own
> right, but wouldn't help with birdsong.
>
> Jeremiah Alexander
> Seattle, WA
>
>
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