How to see a bird’s song
- Press Start microphone outdoors and point the phone or laptop toward the bird. Getting closer helps more than turning anything up: the farther the bird, the more wind and traffic share the picture.
- Songs draw themselves from the right edge. Press Pause after a phrase you like; you can scroll back over the last couple of minutes and zoom in on one call.
- To measure a call, put the cursor on it (on a phone, tap it): the readout gives its pitch in hertz and when it started. Export PNG keeps the sonogram, scales included, for your notes.
Recorded the bird earlier? Switch to Audio file and open the clip. Press Play and follow the playhead to match each phrase you hear to its shape.
Reading a bird spectrogram
The page draws dark marks on a light background, the look of printed sonograms in field guides. Time runs left to right and pitch bottom to top. As Cornell Lab’s Celebrate Urban Birds project explains, bird songs show as continuous lines rather than separate notes, and a spectrogram tells you how long each sound lasts down to the millisecond. A few shapes to look for:
- Whistles are clean single lines: flat for a steady note, sloped for a slurred one.
- Trills are rows of short repeated marks. Count them over a second to compare birds.
- Harmonics are fainter copies of a call stacked above it at two or three times its frequency. They belong to the same sound, not to another bird.
- Buzzes and harsh calls cover a band rather than a line.
The Sound Approach measures a call’s frequency at the vertical middle of its band and its peak frequency at the darkest part. It also advises comparing sonograms only at exactly the same scale: keep this page’s settings, or share them with the Share result button, when you compare recordings.
Settings for other birds
- Owls, doves and bitterns: set the highest frequency to 2000 Hz, where The Sound Approach draws low sounds, and the FFT size to 2048 so slow hoots get finer pitch steps.
- Very high calls: raise the highest frequency to 16000 Hz. Phone microphones vary in how well they pick up the top end.
- Busy dawn chorus: switch Colours to Magma or Viridis, where loudness differences stand out more than in black and white.