An App That Helps You Hear High-Pitched Bird Songs
4/30/20262 min
For years, nature recordist Lang Elliott came up with clever ways to hear high-pitched bird songs despite his high-frequency hearing loss. Lang teamed up with a programmer to develop an app called Hear Birds Again. Currently it’s only available for iPhones, but it’s able to take high-pitch bird songs and shift them down into a lower range.
More info and transcript at BirdNote.org.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJones Franklin· Host0:00
This is BirdNote. [bird song] For years, nature recordist Lang Elliott came up with clever ways to hear high-pitched bird songs despite his high-frequency hearing loss. Back in the '70s, he recorded birds on tape at high speed, then played the tape back at half speed. Slowing the songs down also lowered their pitch.
Lang Elliott· Soundbite0:23
[bird song] And boom. Oh my God, there's twice as many, three times as many birds in the forest singing now as I had perceived. There's this flood of birdsong going on, and I'm detecting a very small part of it.
Jones Franklin· Host0:43
Lang's hearing loss is from a childhood accident, but many people lose their high-frequency hearing due to aging.
Lang Elliott· Soundbite0:50
So there are a lot of birders who, as they get older, they start losing grasshopper sparrow or Cape May warbler, especially the high warblers.
Jones Franklin· Host0:57
Lang teamed up with a programmer to develop an app called Hear Birds Again. Currently, it's only available for Apple devices, but it's able to take high-pitch bird songs and shift them down into a lower range. The app works even better with a special binaural headset so that users can tell whether a sound is coming from the right or left.
Lang Elliott· Soundbite1:17
Detecting a bird without any spatial element is useful, but what's fun is hearing it as if it's out there in a three-D environment, being able to point toward it, being able to actually go find it.