Google Uses Artificial Intelligence to Map Thousands of Bird Sounds Into an Interactive Visualization

If you were around in 2013, you may recall that we told you about Cor­nel­l’s Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929. It’s a splen­did place for ornithol­o­gists and bird lovers to spend time. And, it turns out, the same also applies to com­put­er pro­gram­mers.

Late last year, Google launched an exper­i­ment where, draw­ing on Cor­nel­l’s sound archive, they used machine learn­ing (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence that lets com­put­ers learn and do tasks on their own) to orga­nize thou­sands of bird sounds into a map where sim­i­lar sounds are placed clos­er togeth­er. And it result­ed in this impres­sive inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion. Check it out. Or head into Cor­nel­l’s archive and do your own old-fash­ioned explo­rations.

Note: You can find free cours­es on machine learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in the Relat­eds below.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929 

Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing: A Free Online Course 

A Free Course on Machine Learn­ing & Data Sci­ence from Cal­tech


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  • Søren Knorr Søndergaard says:

    Hel­lo guys,
    Such a nice exper­i­ment you have made! I’m an ornithol­o­gist myself, and I know from prac­ti­cal field expe­ri­ence, that it’s very unusu­al to hear only 1 bird species singing/calling at the same time (when e.g walk­ing in the for­est). Can the AI deci­pher if anoth­er bird is singing in the back­ground of the record, and still iden­ti­fy the tar­get­ed species?

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