The free Merlin Bird ID app can identify bird songs or help you verify the song of a Common Yellowthoat (photo by Brad Imhoff).

Today the Cornell Lab’s Merlin Bird ID app can identify bird songs! Merlin can now recognize the sounds of more than 400 species of birds found in the United States and Canada, with that number to expand rapidly in soon-to-come updates. Merlin’s new sound identification capability is the product of years of work by the Merlin team, and it was made possible thanks to the enormous collection of bird observations and sound recordings contributed by tens of thousands of birders who contribute to eBird and the Macaulay Library.

Automatic song ID has been a dream for decades, but analyzing sound has always been extremely difficult. The breakthrough came when Merlin researchers, began treating the sounds as images and applying new and powerful image classification algorithms like the ones that power Merlin’s Photo ID feature. The Merlin team’s lead researcher, Grant Van Horn, shared that “Each sound recording a user makes gets converted from a waveform to a spectrogram - a way to visualize the amplitude [volume], frequency [pitch], and duration of the sound. 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.”

This pioneering sound-identification technology is integrated into the existing Merlin Bird ID app, meaning Merlin now offers 4 ways to identify a bird - by a sound, by a photo, by answering 5 questions about a bird you saw, or by exploring a list of the birds expected where you are birding.

Macaulay Library web designer Matt Schloss, who describes himself as an advanced beginner beta-tested the app and shared that “Merlin has helped me find birds that I might have overlooked before. It actually makes me feel like I have a superpower, or at least enhanced skills. I truly think this is going to change the way many birders operate.”

For more information about Merlin and how to download this helpful FREE app, see https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/whats-that-bird-song-merlin-bird-id-can-tell-you/