“The Merlin app really unlocks a whole new world of sound,” said the Cornell Lab’s Jessie Barry, whose team led the project. With one-touch access, users can also learn more about each bird with ID tips, maps and more than 80,000 photos and sounds from the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library. The recordings are saved automatically so users can listen to and look at the sounds again, making Merlin a great learning tool. After a user records the bird’s sounds, they can select a species and zip back to the spot in the recording where its song or call occurred. Merlin helps identify individual bird sounds even when multiple birds are singing at the same time. This pioneering sound-identification technology is integrated into the existing Merlin Bird ID app, meaning Merlin now offers four ways to identify a bird: by a sound, by a photo, by answering five questions about a bird you saw, or by exploring a list of the birds expected in the user’s location. “Having this incredibly robust bird dataset – and feeding that into faster and more powerful machine-learning tools – enables Merlin to identify birds by sound now, when doing so seemed like a daunting challenge just a few years ago.” “Thousands of sound recordings train Merlin to recognize each bird species, and more than a billion bird observations in eBird tell Merlin which birds are likely to be present at a particular place and time,” said Drew Weber, Merlin project coordinator. Merlin’s pioneering approach to sound identification is powered by tens of thousands of citizen scientists who contributed their bird observations and sound recordings to eBird, the Cornell Lab’s global database. “So just like Merlin can identify a picture of a bird, it can now use this picture of a bird’s sound to make an ID.” “Each sound recording a user makes gets converted from a waveform to a spectrogram – a way to visualize the amplitude, frequency and duration of the sound,” Van Horn said.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |