<story><title>Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)</title><url>https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/2021/06/22/behind-the-scenes-of-sound-id-in-merlin/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>haswell</author><text>The Merlin app has transformed my nature&amp;#x2F;photo walks, and got me interested in birds.&lt;p&gt;I never realized how many unique birds I was hearing as I’d walk through an area until I turned this app on. It opened a whole new awareness, and helped me remember which bird calls go with which species.&lt;p&gt;There’s also something incredibly cool and satisfying and beautiful about the resulting spectrograms. Watching the shape of the bird call appear visually in realtime really changed my experience of listening.&lt;p&gt;I blame this app for making me buy a birding lens for my camera, which had previously been used primarily for landscapes&amp;#x2F;cityscapes. I highly recommend giving it a try.</text></comment>
<story><title>Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)</title><url>https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/2021/06/22/behind-the-scenes-of-sound-id-in-merlin/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ttt11199907</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always thought that these apps are missing a feature-set: Manipulation of the sound clip prior to identification. In both this app and BirdNET the selection always selects from the lowest recorded frequency to the highest -- I would like to be able to select the frequency band I&amp;#x27;m interested in. Maybe first select time, then put corners on the rectangle to be shaped. The sound file passed to the identifier would appear cropped such that the unselected region is totally silent to the identifier. I am often trying to identify an owl or other lower-registered bird but it is unidentifiable because of noisy crickets&amp;#x2F;cicadas.</text></comment>