Produced by the professionals at Wildlife Acoustics and world-renowned bird expert and illustrator David Sibley comes a revolutionary birding tool known as Song Sleuth.
Much as the name suggests, this innovative new product has the ability to identify bird species using user-generated recordings of their songs. As users record bird songs, the program will instantly suggest was species of bird is singing, covering almost every one of the 200 bird species here in North America.
The Technology
Developed by Wildlife Acoustics, this organization prides itself on pioneering the field of bioacoustic monitoring systems used by researchers, scientists, conservationists and government agencies. Specializing in the natural world, their technology is utilized by professionals around the world who monitor bats, frogs, insects, fish, whale, elephants, rhinos and of course, birds.
Built-in algorithms derived from years of research allow the application to effectively identify the bird species in question, spanning the program’s diverse library of bird songs. While the technology is not fool-proof, as it is unable to identify chips and calls, it does have the ability to give birders another level of confidence when identifying birds by song in the field.
Features
In addition to the song identification technology, the app features a plethora of other capabilities used to even further enhance the bird watching experience. Having been built in conjunction with David Sibley, the app also features Sibley’s bird reference, containing detailed information regarding the approximately 200 bird species and providing users with stunning illustrations and seasonal range maps for each species.
Additionally, the app acts as a data centre, curating all of your recorded songs into an easy to use and easy to access to calls recorded in the past and also gives users the ability to download them to a PC or Mac computer. Each and every recording is also denoted using an interactive and visually appealing spectrograph, allowing users to see a bird’s song in real time.
Much like the technology we love in applications such as eBird, this app also automatically generates a map of songs recorded from days past allowing you to remember where each species was recorded on a Google-enabled map.
How to Get Song Sleuth
Currently speaking, Song Sleuth is available for download on iPhones, with plans to be available in the Google Play store for Android smartphones in the fall of 2017. The cost of the app is $9.99 and is sure to bring your birding experiences to another level!
Watch the Video Below to Learn More!
Song Sleuth 1.0 Tutorial from Wildlife Acoustics on Vimeo.