Birdsong 3D
What does a nightingale's song look like? This experiment turns recordings of birds into a three-dimensional map of sound – to see how calls repeat, vary and combine into phrases, and perhaps one day understand a little more about how birds communicate.
Every point is a moment of sound
- A point is a slice of the recording about 11 milliseconds long. The cloud grows in sync with playback.
- Position comes from the timbre of the sound (40 MFCC coefficients reduced to 3D with PCA). Moments that sound alike end up close together, so a repeated call keeps returning to the same region.
- Colour is the spectral centroid – the “centre of gravity” of the frequencies, in hertz.
- Size follows the energy of the sound: quiet chirps stay small, the loudest peaks become large accents.
- Calls, not just frames. The tool detects individual calls and compares whole calls, keeping the order of their changes – a rising and a falling whistle are not the same thing.
- A memory across recordings. Call types are kept in a persistent atlas, so the same type can be recognised again in the next recording.
- Phrases and motifs. Repeated sequences of calls – like a cuckoo's “cu-coo” – are found and can be listened to one by one.
- Live mode. The map can also grow from a microphone in real time.
Songs as shapes
New visualizations – one species at a time – are published as short videos on YouTube.
An open question, explored carefully
Birdsong 3D is a personal research experiment. It is not published and not for sale. It analyses the acoustic structure of song – repetitions, variations and sequences – and makes it visible. It does not translate what birds “say”, and it does not identify species.
Whether patterns in these shapes can help us understand bird communication is exactly the question the project explores. Detected “calls” and “phrases” are measurements of sound, not confirmed biological units, and similar shapes do not prove that two sounds mean the same thing.
Inspired by Seeing Birdsong by Lucio Arese, which maps short slices of bird song with 40 MFCCs and PCA. Birdsong 3D is an independent project and is not affiliated with that work; call detection, the atlas and phrase analysis are its own extensions.