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Scientists working to decode birdsong
- frereubu 2y ago> “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 2y agoDogs in my street barking at night are totally saying similar things for half an hour.
- 11235813213455 2y agoWhile I'm totally fine with birds sounds, dog barks are so annoying, almost as much as motorbikes
- worble 2y agoHaha same, and this Mitchell and Webb skit as well which parodies the same thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9A5y6mXMh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9A5y6mXMh8
- cubefox 2y agoThis reminds me of The Far Side: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f0/24/0d/f0240d4ff7e3e08700f48d944cae8285.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f0/24/0d/f0240d4ff7e3e08700f48d944...
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoThat and the other main use: Want to have sex? Want to have sex? Want to have sex?
- supriyo-biswas 2y agohttps://archive.ph/SDiJ3 https://archive.ph/SDiJ3
- croisillon 2y agoreminds me of the "i wish i could talk to ponies" comic
- dghughes 2y agoQuite 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 2y agoYou 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au5tGPPcPus
- dghughes 2y agoAlso 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 2y agoThis 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.
- shermantanktop 2y agoJust don’t clap on the 1 and 3, please. Lots of videos of musicians attempting to get the crowd to clap on the 2 and 4…but the audience has a mind of its own.
- lubujackson 2y agoI 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.
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- wormlord 2y agoI 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=Sperm%20whale%20vocalisations%20are%20more%20expressive%20and%20structured,organisms%20with%20divergent%20evolutionary%20lineage%20and%20vocal%20apparatus https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8#:~:text=S....
- pvaldes 2y ago> 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 2y agoMore likely, instructing birds to fly in Nike Swoosh formation (or some other logo) on command for cheap low altitude sky adverts.
- hotspot_one 2y agoAnd this is why capitalism will always win over communism :)
- jampekka 2y ago
- more_corn 2y agoDidn’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 2y ago"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 2y agoI 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 2y agoDoes 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 2y agoA 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 2y agoWouldn'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 2y agoWe 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 2y agoWhy 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.
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- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoReminds me of this classic bit (Archive, because they have a paywall, now): https://web.archive.org/web/20160718151008/http://www.thedailymash.co.uk:80/news/environment/britain-enchanted-by-birds-telling-each-other-to-fk-off-20160413107967 https://web.archive.org/web/20160718151008/http://www.thedai...
- nanna 2y agoMay I use this opportunity to alert you to the excellent bird identification app by Cornell University, Merlin. https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/ https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
- yunohn 2y ago+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 2y agoGood idea!
- userabchn 2y agoI 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 2y agoYou 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 2y agoCan 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?
- drilbo 2y agoI didn't immediately see a way around the "Please enter your email" prompt, but long pressing the icon (on android) gives context menu with options like "Choose photo" and "Start new recording" that open into the main app without any login.
- 11235813213455 2y agoare they "singing" or aren't they simply talking/communicating?
- LinuxBender 2y agoWill 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 2y agoI'm sorry but that's just adorable.
- LinuxBender 2y agoNo 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 2y agoThe Cornell Bird Lab via the Macauley Library accepts citizen science recordings https://support.ebird.org/en/support/solutions/folders/48000669504 https://support.ebird.org/en/support/solutions/folders/48000... I think unusual bird behavior recordings are appreciated by scientists
- LinuxBender 2y agoThankyou 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 2y agoHave 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/ https://xeno-canto.org/
- calebm 2y agoSo 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 2y agoWhat you're describing is a recreational activity, that doesn't serve any practical purpose. Evolution rarely favors that.
- calebm 2y agoNo... 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).
- shermantanktop 2y agoIf the only reason anything happened was inexorable evolutionary forces, we might all be crabs…
- zcw100 2y agoAnyone interested in this subject might find this art project interesting as well "Deep Fake Birdsong 2020" https://www.kellyheatonstudio.com/deep-fake-birdsong https://www.kellyheatonstudio.com/deep-fake-birdsong
- jesprenj 2y agoIt 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 2y agoTo 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/0192801422 https://www.amazon.com/Mock-Mockingbird-Raymond-Smullyan/dp/...
- michaelmior 2y agoIf 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 https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi
- styczen 2y agosimple: give me a worm or money
- johnaspden 2y agoFancy a fuck? Fancy a fight? My tree! My tree!
- joelignaatius 2y agoSo there was this German scientist that went about decoding how bees communicate where pollen sources are. I believe he won a noble prize for it. He had to individually hand paint bees. I can't remember the details and I'm too lazy to look it up. The point here is that if you want to know what birds are saying you'd probably have to record the flapping of wings (especially with the more colorful birds) and then the bird song - their eyesight is particularly acute due to needing to eat fresh berries so body posture is most likely important in communication. A high def camera and microphone and an LLM should be able to do the job if the data is good enough on a particular species. From there you should be able to extrapolate to multiple species. The language would probably be along the lines of a few set phrases - wanna mate? - where's food? Here's food! - stay away - fly together south? Stuff like that.
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- ambientenv 2y agoWhat if we don't spend the effort, time, and money to 'decode' birdsong? What if we don't feel the need to uncover such, to reinforce the human exceptionalism? What if it really wasn't meant for us to know? What if we simply just relaxed and immersed ourselves in the beauty of birdsong? Would we be somehow deprived?
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- shermantanktop 2y agoSome of us would be happier not knowing. Some of us would be happier knowing. Maybe the trick is to be able to know, and then temporarily not know when that knowledge is harmful.
- lakomen 2y agoThat's something I was thinking about, but don't have the brain juice to do. Every bird species has its own language. I'd say tempo, frequency, pause duration, it all plays a role. Do dogs have a language? Woof woof woof sounds a lot like the crows craaaw craaaw, and while they don't speak they do communicate. Maybe there are nuances just us can't hear or recognize. It's certainly fascinating. How do you map sound to action, you can't analyze it independently, but also need to take the environment into account