Welcome to the UEA / BTO Audio Checker app!
This purpose-built tool is part of a collaborative research project between the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), investigating how accurately automated bird sound identification tools perform under different real-world conditions.
You will be presented with short audio clips and their spectrograms and asked to identify whether particular bird species are present or absent. Your responses will be compared with identifications made by an automated bird sound classifier.
By contributing, you will help us investigate how classifier performance varies across different seasons, times of day and environments. The results will help researchers better understand the strengths and limitations of automated bird sound identification and improve how these tools are used for ecological monitoring.
Thank you for contributing to this citizen science initiative and supporting the future of ecoacoustics research.
Please insert your details to proceed.
If you have any issues, please contact William Gough on w.gough@uea.ac.uk.
Before you start
For the clearest listening, try to work in a quiet room and use headphones if possible. Some clips are naturally faint, and the focal bird call may be difficult to hear alongside other sounds or background calls. This is normal, and the aim is simply to choose the best answer based on what you can hear.
1. To begin checking audio clips, expand the Verify section and click the Start button to see the first randomly selected clip.
2. After clicking Start, a spectrogram will appear. This is a visual representation of the audio clip you are about to verify.
3. On the spectrogram there are two dashed vertical lines at 1 and 4 seconds, the area between indicates the focus area where the bird vocalisation is expected. If the vocalisation extends outside this area, you can use this to inform your verification, but please do not report any species or sounds solely located outside the lines.
4. Use the audio player below the spectrogram to listen to the audio clip.
5. Once you have listened to the audio clip please answer the first question. Tick Yes or No to indicate whether you can hear a bird species in the audio clip.
6. If you ticked Yes, use the search bar below to enter the English name (e.g., Woodpigeon). You can select multiple species if more than one is present. If you are unsure on what species is present then you can click Unknown. Click the X button to clear your choices or use the search bar to click on a single species to remove.
7. Next, tick Yes or No to indicate whether you hear any other sounds besides bird vocalisations in the focal area.
8. If you ticked Yes, click one (or more) of the available categories that best fits your answer:
- Human voice (e.g., laughter, speech, shouting)
- Vehicle (e.g., horns, traffic, tractors)
- Animal other (e.g. any other sound from other species including cats, dogs, and livestock)
- Weather (e.g., wind, rain etc)
- Microphone noise (e.g., hiss, static, hum)
- Unknown sound (cannot identify the sound present)
9. When you've made your selection, click Submit. This will save your answers and load a new audio clip and spectrogram ready for your next verification.
10. If you think you made a mistake, you can click the red Undo last submission button to go back and re-verify the previous audio clip.
For the full written guidance, please see the PDF: Instructions.pdf