[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

We’ll probably go another fifteen years and never post another word about Merlin, but just to balance the prior posting about Merlin and your phone’s memory, here’s an article from the Tuscon Audubon Society about how to work with Merlin to make its ID skills better.
— Chuck Almdale

Record Bird Sounds and Make Merlin Better!

By Scott Crabtree, 1 August 2024

Opening paragraphs:

How often have you thought, “I wish the Merlin app was better at identifying the birds I’m hearing. Why haven’t those people at Cornell fixed this?”

The developers at Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology use computer vision and machine learning to create the sound identification algorithms used in the Merlin Sound ID app. It’s all based on the sound recordings resident in the Macaulay Library—those are the recordings submitted by birders like you and me!

Cornell needs a minimum of 100 quality recordings of a single species to train that species’ model. They need good spectrograms (a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time) because the Merlin app uses them for identification.