[HN Gopher] Scientists working to decode birdsong
___________________________________________________________________
Scientists working to decode birdsong
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 124 points
Date : 2024-10-21 03:22 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| frereubu wrote:
| > "Social birds . . . are constantly chatting to each other,"
| Mike Webster, an animal-communication expert at Cornell, says.
| "What in the hell are they saying?"
|
| Whenever I hear this question I always remember the Eddie Izzard
| skit about birdsong being territorial, so the nightingale in "A
| Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" was essentially shouting
| "Get out of Berkeley Square! It's _my_ Square! "
| dilawar wrote:
| Dogs in my street barking at night are totally saying similar
| things for half an hour.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| While I'm totally fine with birds sounds, dog barks are so
| annoying, almost as much as motorbikes
| worble wrote:
| Haha same, and this Mitchell and Webb skit as well which
| parodies the same thing
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9A5y6mXMh8
| cubefox wrote:
| This reminds me of The Far Side:
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f0/24/0d/f0240d4ff7e3e08700f48d944...
| croisillon wrote:
| reminds me of the "i wish i could talk to ponies" comic
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| https://archive.ph/SDiJ3
| dghughes wrote:
| Quite a few geese are flying over me each day now. I've convinced
| myself they are saying to each other "left..left..OK
| straight...right a bit...OK". I'm a amazed at how precise they
| can be (an sometimes not) like they all stop flapping at once and
| glide then flap again. There were at least 24 to 40 geese all
| acting in perfect harmony.
| TomK32 wrote:
| You think it needs a lot of coordination to fly in sync? I only
| have a slow clap for you, actually everybody else join in for
| the clapping and without any coordination whatsoever you'll
| notice that we clap in sync after a just 50 seconds
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au5tGPPcPus
| dghughes wrote:
| Also the changing of the point goose one guy takes over the
| lead falls to the back and one of the two of the V behind the
| main goose takes over.
|
| And they never shut up, plus they are so loud. They're
| talking about something.
| bombela wrote:
| This slow clap thing is a tradition to ask for an
| encore/bis/repeat at concerts. So I wouldn't be so quick at
| stating that this is an emergent phenomenon.
|
| But maybe this has become the tradition because when you clap
| for a long time it would slowly synchronize.
|
| In the video it is quite clear a few people are seeding the
| synchronisation.
| lubujackson wrote:
| I remember seeing a video from the 80s about how the behavior
| is emergent - they made a computer program that replicated how
| birds fly by stating just a few axioms like don't fall behind
| and don't be in front.
|
| The idea being that the V takes shape because they want to have
| a bird in front of them the entire time while one poor bird
| gets stuck out in front.
| grose wrote:
| Boids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids
| Suppafly wrote:
| >The idea being that the V takes shape because they want to
| have a bird in front of them the entire time while one poor
| bird gets stuck out in front.
|
| I imagine they take turns like bicyclists do, right?
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Ever seen a starling murmuration?
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...
|
| https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(11)01315...
|
| https://bioone.org/journals/northwestern-naturalist/volume-1...
| tiagod wrote:
| These are happening this time of the year where I live. I
| like to go out at sunset to watch them dance. It's amazing
| how they coordinate so well at such close quarters, looks
| like a single organism from afar.
| wormlord wrote:
| I am surprised we don't see more "Dr. Doolittle" projects like
| this. I assumed rats or corvids would be good candidates for
| animal language translation projects since you can keep them in a
| confined space and record video of them. I am sure that body
| language plays a huge role in animal communication.
|
| I recently read a paper[0] that claimed to have decoded the basic
| building blocks of Sperm whale language. I went and took a look
| at the github for the project CETI and found that most of the
| code was for the whale trackers and hydrophones. It seems like
| there are a lot of pre-requisite problems that you have to solve
| to even get good whale recordings.
|
| On the other hand though, whales probably don't rely on body
| language since they are communicating way out of line of sight.
| So it may be easier in that regard.
|
| Anyways, I am convinced that we will figure out how to teach some
| basic human concepts (like self) to animals and the intelligence
| of even "stupid" animals like chickens will make people more
| reluctant to eat meat.
|
| [0]
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8#:~:text=S....
| pvaldes wrote:
| > I am surprised we don't see more "Dr. Doolittle" projects
| like this
|
| Robots asking millions of birds to attack any hooman at sight
| in its own bird language, AKA the Tippi Hedren project. Seems
| pretty fly.
| speed_spread wrote:
| More likely, instructing birds to fly in Nike Swoosh
| formation (or some other logo) on command for cheap low
| altitude sky adverts.
| hotspot_one wrote:
| And this is why capitalism will always win over communism
| :)
| jampekka wrote:
| A major reason was that there was a dogma that language is
| uniquely human phenomenon. It was already part of the hugely
| Decartes' philosophy of mind and got a strong revival with
| Chomskian linguistics and the "cognitive revolution" in the
| late 1950's.
|
| There was sporadaric research into animal linguistics, e.g. the
| Koko study, but those were dismissed on the grounds that
| animals can't have language by definition.
|
| The ethics of enslaving and torturing animals is definitely
| part of the motivation for the dogma.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| To be clear - as of today, many researchers would agree that
| language is still a uniquely human phenomenon. They discuss
| this pretty explicitly in the article linked, how it is
| important to draw a distinction between language and
| communication. There are no non-human species that have been
| found to use language for the Chomskian definition of
| language (using a finite set of symbols to represent an
| infinite number of communicable meanings).
|
| However, this "dogma" as you call it is beginning to be
| weakened as researchers document more nuance and complexity
| in non-human communication than ever before, and so some
| researchers begin to say, "maybe we shouldn't have this all-
| or-nothing view of language". But it is simply not true that
| researchers are suppressing evidence of language in animals
| out of a desire to enslave and torture them.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite
| number of communicable meanings
|
| This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very large
| number of communicable meanings, sure, but infinite?
| Majromax wrote:
| > This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very
| large number of communicable meanings, sure, but
| infinite?
|
| This is "trivial" in the boring kind of way. With just
| digits, we can communicate an infinite set of distinct
| numbers simply by counting.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We can't really communicate an infinite amount of
| numbers. People just can't read or remember too many
| digits.
| Affric wrote:
| We can. Scientific notation with 1 significant figure can
| be meaningful because we can use it to figure out order
| relations. It's an infinite language.
| conradev wrote:
| David Deutsch claims in "The Beginning of Infinity" this
| is a property called universality, and that we have it. A
| short excerpt:
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HDyePg6oySYQ9hY4i/david-
| deut...
|
| The whole book is worth reading, though, as it lays it
| out in more detail.
| gyomu wrote:
| Seems trivially demonstrable because you can just chain
| things forever?
|
| Mary ran after the dog and the dog was brown and a cat
| came along and...
| MourYother wrote:
| > you can just chain thing forever
|
| I think you're going to find out that no, you can't, and
| this impossibility is going to trivially demonstrate
| itself.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Recite 99 bottles of beer on the wall, but start from 1
| and change so the number increases? Stop when there are
| no remaining numbers or when you reach infinity,
| whichever comes first.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So, is this a proposal to test how long it takes for you
| to lose your count?
| nick__m wrote:
| They are talking as if language was some platonic
| construct like a Turing machine with an infinite tape and
| you are talking about the concrete reality where there
| are no such things as an infinite tape.
|
| Both viewpoints are useful, they can prove general
| properties that hold for arbitrary long sequence of words
| and you put a practical bound on that length.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Can you say more? English doesn't have any cap on
| sentence length I think i'm missing your point
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Since English has several possible sentences that are
| infinite in length, made up of only one word even
| https://medium.com/luminasticity/grammatical-infinities-
| what... I have to agree with all the this is trivial
| comments.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Whatever "finite set of symbols" humans use to
| communicate is _not_ the finite set of symbols that form
| letters or words. Communication isn 't discrete in
| practical sense, it's continuous - any symbol can take
| not just different meanings, but different shades and
| superposition of meanings, based on the differences in
| way it's articulated (tone, style of writing - including
| colors), context in which it shows, and context of the
| whole situation.
|
| The only way you can represent this symbolically is in
| the trivial sense like you can represent everything,
| because you can use few symbols to build up natural
| numbers, and then you can use those numbers to
| approximate everything else. But I doubt it's what
| Chomsky had in mind.
| jampekka wrote:
| > There are no non-human species that have been found to
| use language for the Chomskian definition of language
| (using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite
| number of communicable meanings)
|
| It's far from clear whether humans are capable of the
| Chomskian criteria of language. And Chomskian linguistics
| have more or less collapsed with the huge success of
| statistical methods.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument is, if anything,
| strengthened by LLMs. You need to read the entire
| internet to make statistical methods work at producing
| grammatical texts. Children don't read the entire
| internet but do produce grammatical texts. Therefore &c.
| QED.
| jjk7 wrote:
| Children do get ~6000 hours a year of stimulus. Spoken,
| unspoken, written, and body language. Even then they
| aren't able to form language proficiently until 5 or 6
| years old. Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of
| stimulus?
| culi wrote:
| > Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus?
|
| Is this a joke?
| jjk7 wrote:
| I'm sure someone else could calculate the informational
| density of all of the text on the internet vs. 30,000
| hours of sight, smell, touch, sound, etc density. My
| intuition tells me it's not even close.
| culi wrote:
| I agree its not even close! A single day of YouTube
| uploads alone is 720,000 hours!
| snapcaster wrote:
| I think what he's saying is that "real world" interaction
| is so high bandwidth it dwarfs internet (screen based)
| stimulation. Not saying I agree just that he's not
| comparing hours being alive to hours of youtube
| feoren wrote:
| Does the information contained in smell and touch
| contribute to the acquisition of language? Keep in mind
| you'd be arguing that people born without a sense of
| smell take longer to develop language, or are otherwise
| deficient in it in some way. I'm doubtful. It's certainly
| tricky to measure full sight / sound vs. text, but
| luckily we don't have to, because we also have video
| online, which, surprise surprise, utterly dwarfs 30,000
| hours of sight and sound in terms of total information.
| feoren wrote:
| 30,000 hours is about the amount of new video uploaded to
| YouTube every hour.
| jjk7 wrote:
| That's astonishing. If you watched all of them, how much
| new information would you learn? I suspect a large
| portion of them are the same information presented
| differently; for example a news story duplicated by
| hundreds of different channels.
| Tostino wrote:
| It's a huge amount of video-game footage included in
| those "hours of video uploaded per-hour".
|
| So very, very little new info will be conveyed by the
| vast majority of the content.
| Affric wrote:
| Yeah, I imagine every moment of communication a child
| receives is new information not just baby talk about
| getting the spoon in their mouth and asking them if they
| have pooped.
| OneManyNone wrote:
| I think this is greatly complicated by the fact that the
| human brain has been "pre-trained" (in the deep learning
| sense) by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
|
| A pre-trained LLM also can also learn new concepts from
| extremely few examples. Humans may still be much smarter
| but I think there's a lot of reason to believe that the
| mechanics are similar.
| culi wrote:
| > And Chomskian linguistics have more or less collapsed
| with the huge success of statistical methods.
|
| People have been saying this for decades. But the hype
| around large language models is finally starting to wane
| and I wouldn't be surprised if in another 10 years we
| hear again that we "finally disproved generative
| linguistics" (again?)
|
| Also, how many R's are in "racecar"?
| OneManyNone wrote:
| Counterpoint: What progress has generative linguistics
| made in the same amount of time that deep learning has
| been around? It sure doesn't seem to be working well.
|
| Also, the racecar example is because of tokenization in
| LLMs - they don't actually see the raw letters of the
| text they read. It would be like me asking you to read
| this sentence in your head and then tell me which
| syllable would have the lowest pitch when spoken aloud.
| Maybe you could do it, but it would take effort because
| it doesn't align with the way you're interpreting the
| input.
| netdevnet wrote:
| Your usage of "language" here is akin to laymen usage of
| "hypothesis" and "theory" and then trying to apply it in an
| academic context. Same sequence of letters but different
| meaning. In linguistics, "language" has a specific definition
| that only humans have been shown to have. Some trained
| individuals like Koko do seem to demostrate an very limited
| ability to use "language" in the linguistics sense.
|
| You might argue that the definition itself is arbitrary and
| coming from the same place that geocentrism, creationism and
| flat-Earth views come from. I can't argue for or against
| that.
|
| I suspect things as more nuanced than the current definition
| that we have though, especially after the recent study from
| the Scientific American that heated up Hacker News in a way
| that only "Is CS a science" articles can.
| jampekka wrote:
| There's no consensus on the definition of what language is.
|
| Chomskian linguistics does posit that human language is
| based on (innate) recursive grammars (narrow language
| faculty hypothesis), but this has always been a contentious
| question. And per that definition humans too have
| demonstrated only very limited ability in e.g. infinite
| embedding.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| My dog can push buttons to let me know what he wants. Those
| buttons speak in English. Is that language?
| throwup238 wrote:
| I think it only counts if he can express that he wants
| you to urinate on the same fire hydrant after he does.
|
| That's the minimum level of complexity science will
| accept.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I think most dog owners would tell you that their adult
| dogs can communicate things like this, but that the
| language is unfortunately siloed into a very personal
| relationship that is difficult for even the human part of
| the pair to demonstrate, making it difficult to do
| science about
| wormlord wrote:
| Sometimes at bedtime my cat will go to the door and
| scream nonstop. I don't know why he does it. Maybe it is
| for food or attention. But the only way I have found to
| get him to stop is to pick him up, put him on his special
| pillow, squish him, and have my partner join me in
| telling him "we are going to bed, it's bedtime".
|
| I'd say about 80% of the time he listens. So he is
| capable of understanding what we want him to do, and
| capable of supressing his own personal desires in order
| to maintain harmony in our group. Funny enough, he won't
| go to bed unless both me and my partner tell him it is
| bedtime, so maybe he is only obeying because there is
| some majority consensus?
|
| Because of this, I find it easy to believe that a cat or
| dog could be taught something as abstract as "self" if
| they can understand commands and intent and group
| dynamics. It's just difficult to tell what is
| "understood" and what is just conditioned behavior. Hell,
| I can't even answer that question for myself as a human.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| "Language" in the sense of "the thing only humans have
| been shown to do" requires a bit more than just one to
| one correlations between signifiers and objects (or a
| "sentence" of signifiers with the same meaning as all of
| the words added together independently). For a system of
| symbols to be "language" there must be a difference
| between "what the cat ate" and "what ate the cat". No
| animal communication has been shown to have a grammar to
| it, and thus the ability to express exponentially many
| unique ideas with each additional word.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I feel like there are human languages where the symbolic
| distinction between "what the cat ate" and "what ate the
| cat" are nil and the understanding is achieved
| contextually.
| jerf wrote:
| However, another major reason is that people have repeatedly
| gone seeking for language-like or human-language-level
| behaviors in animals, and repeatedly and consistently failed.
|
| It is also worth pointing out that _detecting_ language is a
| great deal easier than _understanding_ language. Something
| like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c is
| reasonably recognizable as clearly some sort of language even
| if we have no (unassisted) human idea what it is saying. We
| can tell with quite high confidence that most animal sounds
| are not hiding some deeper layer of information content.
|
| Such exceptions as there are, like whalesong, take you back
| to my first paragraph, though.
|
| The idea that language is a uniquely human phenomenon may be
| "dogma", but it is also fairly well-founded in fact. It
| should also not be that surprising; had another species
| developed language first, they'd be the ones looking around
| at their surroundings being surprised they are the only ones
| with proper language, because they'd probably be the dominant
| species on the planet. It isn't a "humanist" bias, in some
| sense that humans are super special because they're humans,
| it's a "first species to high language" bias, which happens
| on this planet to be humans.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| There still is, as far as I can tell. Whenever my curiosity
| drives me to take a psychology or philosophy class I end up
| with the feeling that they think part of their job is to
| reassure the rest of the humans that we are in fact special.
| It feels like some kind of leftover from when that kind of
| work was done by monks.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Really? I distinctly remember a lot of pissed off kids in
| my college philosophy and psychology classes trying to
| defend their religious beliefs and that we are more than
| just monkeys with fancier tools. Most of the religious
| folks (at least vocally) dropped out of Philosophy 101
| after 2 weeks. It was incredibly entertaining. I guess this
| was 20 years ago, but assuming we are a more secular
| society I guess I thought that would still be the case.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... So, you are in full agreement with the GP?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It's a bit different at the intro level. I'm talking
| about the professors and the grad students. It's not that
| they're directly religious, but I get a status-quo-
| preserving kind of feeling from them. Like maybe they're
| influenced by a tradition of not calling your patron an
| ape--or somesuch.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Weird, I would think it would be much less hand-holdy at
| that level.
| goatlover wrote:
| We are objectively special in creating technological
| civilization with all sorts of cultural artifacts like
| philosophy that we have no evidence for in other species
| that have existed on this planet, other than possibly a few
| of our close hominid relatives. Hominids are a very special
| evolutionary branch in that sense.
|
| When we think about ETs, we're wondering about
| technological civilizations on other planets with space
| craft and radio telescopes, not the equivalent of birds or
| dolphins.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Dr Doolittle on corvids would be easy.
|
| 1. Train crows to push a touchscreen for reward of food.
|
| 2. Next set up two touchscreens back to back. Make it so
| touching one screen only dispenses food on the other side.
|
| 3. Next make it so food is dispensed on the other side only one
| crow is perched at each terminal.
|
| 4. Next make it so food is only dispensed after a crow says
| something to the other crow on the other side.
|
| 5. Next display a picture on one terminal and give the other
| crow the choice of four quadrants. The food is dispensed if the
| picture on the far side matches the displayed picture.
|
| 6. Start decoding words.
| lacker wrote:
| Hey, that makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of crows who
| come to the bird feeder in my backyard. I would just have to
| figure out how to easily make a food dispenser, and what sort
| of touch screen a crow can activate....
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I would do it myself but where I am there are almost no
| corvids, they (and city pigeons) are basically displaced by
| the highly aggressive local bird. Which seems to swarm
| around from time to time but doesn't stay anywhere
| permanent locally except for grocery store parking lots.
| That's probably enough to leak location info on this anon
| account so I'll shut up now
| wormlord wrote:
| This could be done cheaply with some rooted Kindle Fire
| tablets. I don't follow 100% but it sounds cool.
| dekhn wrote:
| Not exactly your protocol, but I'm reminded of
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-
| taught-...
| more_corn wrote:
| Didn't Douglas Adams have a bit about this? Once you figure it
| out you'd do anything to return to blissful ignorance. It's all
| inane chatter about what's for dinner, who's looking hot today,
| and more than anyone would ever want to know about wind speed and
| weather conditions.
| havaloc wrote:
| "He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their
| conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with
| windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit
| about berries."
| af3d wrote:
| I always fancied that they might be debating philosophical
| points or maybe even offering up "tweets" of wisdom. Owl: "In
| order to understand the very nature of the mind itself, one
| must earnestly seek to find the answer to this riddle:
| WHOoooooooo?!"
| infruset wrote:
| Does anyone have a clue how far we are from having "LLMs for
| animals"? Even if we don't understand what the LLM is saying to a
| dolphin or a monkey, does it change much from feeding millions of
| texts to a model without ever explaining language to it as a
| prerequisite?
| jampekka wrote:
| A predictive/generative model of animal "vocalizations" would
| be almost trivial to do with current speech or music generation
| models. And those could be conditioned with contextual
| information easily.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Wouldn't we need several hundred gigabytes of
| ingestible/structured contextual info for animal
| vocalizations in order to train a model with any accuracy?
| Even if we had it, seems to me the model would be able to
| tell us what sounds probably "should" follow those of a given
| recording, but not what they mean.
| lossolo wrote:
| We could train a transformer that could predict the next
| token, whether it's the next sound from one animal or a
| sound from another animal replying to it. However, we
| wouldn't understand the majority of what it means, except
| for the most obvious sounds that we could derive from
| context and observation of behavior. This wouldn't result
| in a ChatGPT-like interface, as it is impossible for us to
| translate most of these sounds into a meaningful
| conversation with animals.
| visarga wrote:
| Why not label a fine-tuning dataset with human
| descriptions based on video recordings. We explain in
| human language what they do, and then tune the model. It
| doesn't need to be a very large dataset, but it would
| allow for models to directly translate to human language
| from bird calls.
| amelius wrote:
| But then it's not a translation of the bird tweets, but
| more like a predictive mapping from tweets to behaviors.
| goatlover wrote:
| Reminds me of Wittgenstein's if a lion could speak, we
| would not understand it.
| jampekka wrote:
| Something like this?
| https://search.acousticobservatory.org/
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| It's "almost trivial" and "easily" done, I only wonder why we
| aren't speaking to animals already.
|
| Oh wait. Because the devil's in the details, the ones SW dev
| hubris glosses over ;) ;)
| jampekka wrote:
| To clarify: I didn't mean a model that would "translate"
| animal sounds to some representation of language or
| meaning. I meant a model that would capture statistical
| regularities in animal sounds and perhaps be able to link
| these to contextual information (e.g. time of day, other
| animals around, season etc).
|
| By almost trivial I mean it wouldn't require much new
| technology. Something like WaveNet or VQ-VAE could be
| applied almost out of the box.
|
| Data availability is may be a significant problem, but
| there are some huge animal sound datasets. E.g.
| https://blog.google/intl/en-au/company-
| news/technology/a2o-s...
| joshvm wrote:
| Generative models yes, since there are terabytes of audio
| available. High quality contextual info is much harder to
| obtain. It's like saying that we could easily build a model
| for X _if_ we had training data available.
|
| With LLMs we can leverage human insight to e.g. caption or
| describe images (which was what made CLIP and successors
| possible). With animals we often have no idea beyond a
| location. There is work to include kinematic data with audio
| to try and associate movement with vocalisation but it's
| early days.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/can-generative-ai-
| he...
| dleeftink wrote:
| Captivating watch from Aza Raskin on the subject:
|
| https://youtu.be/3tUXbbbMhvk
| joshvm wrote:
| Someone already mentioned Aza Raskin, but the organisation you
| should look up is Earth Species Project. It's a fairly open
| question and fairly philosophical - do the semantics of
| language transcend species? Certainly there is evidence that
| "concepts" are somewhat language agnostic in LLM embedding
| spaces.
|
| https://www.earthspecies.org/about-us#team
| benlivengood wrote:
| Presumably anyone with a multimodal transformer already
| pretrained on Human data could be further pretrained on animal
| vocalizations. I don't know whether any of the large model
| owners are doing this.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Reminds me of this classic bit (Archive, because they have a
| paywall, now):
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160718151008/http://www.thedai...
| nanna wrote:
| May I use this opportunity to alert you to the excellent bird
| identification app by Cornell University, Merlin.
|
| https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
| yunohn wrote:
| +1, this app is an eye opener to the nature around oneself. So
| much so, I have actually linked it to my iPhones action button
| to make it easier to open on a whim.
| nanna wrote:
| Good idea!
| userabchn wrote:
| I installed it a year or two ago but was disappointed by its
| identification abilities. Then it changed to require providing
| an email address so I deleted it.
| joshvm wrote:
| You might have used the wrong model. They tend to be location
| specific, so if you live in eg Australia make sure you get
| the appropriate pack. It does skew to more common species -
| there is a very long tail in species recognition.
| nanna wrote:
| Can confirm that it doesn't require an email these days. You
| can create an account and upload your recordings but
| otherwise no account needed
|
| I've been more than happy with it's id abilities.
|
| Maybe give it another try?
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| Great app for playing bird songs and annoying them once you've
| identified them, too. Sometimes you can get a few chirping
| really loudly at you and confused why their new friend looks
| like an iPhone.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| are they "singing" or aren't they simply talking/communicating?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Will there be a place I can upload bird recordings? I have half a
| dozen wild grouse _that think they are my chickens_ and they have
| dozens of different sounds they babble at me and I have no idea
| what they are trying to convey. I try to mimic the sounds they
| make. Sometimes they chat back and forth with me until I get
| bored, sometimes they follow me whereas one particular sound
| makes them wander off.
| ainiriand wrote:
| I'm sorry but that's just adorable.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| No need to apologize. Many of the animals here are fun to
| interact with. Maybe this upcoming winter I will try to
| record the deer when it's feeding time. There's usually 2 or
| 3 fawn that are right on my heels _testing_ each food pile to
| see which one is the _right one_ not realizing they should
| just start with the first one to get more time to eat.
| monknomo wrote:
| The Cornell Bird Lab via the Macauley Library accepts citizen
| science recordings
|
| https://support.ebird.org/en/support/solutions/folders/48000...
|
| I think unusual bird behavior recordings are appreciated by
| scientists
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Thankyou for that. I will check it out! Maybe one day the
| decoding project can ingest all the sound content.
|
| Reading through the rules I like these people already. They
| prefer high quality .wav files as do I. Not sure if I have
| the skills to edit to their standard but I will try.
| joshvm wrote:
| Have a look at xeno-canto as well, a large repo of animal
| sounds. It's more of a general archive than specifically for
| "understanding", for example it's often used to train audio
| recognition models.
|
| https://xeno-canto.org/
| calebm wrote:
| So this is purely anecdotal, but it seems to me that bird songs
| work kind of like drum circles. A bird can sing a pattern, and
| see if anyone else can replay the pattern. If you can, then the
| initiating bird will slightly modify the pattern, and see if you
| are able to pick up on the nuance. With drum circles, people
| typically play off of patterns set by others. And both the leader
| and follower can tell that they are in sync with each other. I
| suspect that this dynamic is at the core of a lot of bird song
| interactions. And to try to translate that into a human language
| would not work well.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| What you're describing is a recreational activity, that doesn't
| serve any practical purpose. Evolution rarely favors that.
| calebm wrote:
| No... it is more than recreational. It is a way to establish
| shared understanding (which could be a test of how similar
| you are, and intelligence).
| zcw100 wrote:
| Anyone interested in this subject might find this art project
| interesting as well "Deep Fake Birdsong 2020"
| https://www.kellyheatonstudio.com/deep-fake-birdsong
| jesprenj wrote:
| It would be pretty useful if we could somehow convince birds to
| relay our messages using birdsongs -- just use a speaker to
| transmit a message, encoded in birdsong with some special
| preamble header, and it will get broadcast or unicast to the
| desired destination bird that happens to be located near a
| microphone that receives this message. Could this scheme beat
| IPoAC? Maybe if we manage to reverse engineer birdsongs well
| enough, BGP could be ported to birds!
| ddtaylor wrote:
| To Mock a Mockingbird was a book that was sent to me and I
| enjoyed it. I can't fully do all of the puzzles, but they are for
| sure fun.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Mock-Mockingbird-Raymond-Smullyan/dp/...
| michaelmior wrote:
| If anyone has a spare Raspberry Pi and is looking for a fun
| project, consider BirdNET-PI[0]. It turns your Raspberry Pi into
| a 24/7 bird monitoring device. You need a microphone and then it
| will automatically detect birds by their songs and report them to
| the BirdWeather service that helps monitor bird populations.
|
| [0] https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi
| styczen wrote:
| simple:
|
| give me a worm or money
| johnaspden wrote:
| Fancy a fuck? Fancy a fight? My tree! My tree!
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