{"guid":"f459ab97-d2aa-5100-8e38-8218e817ed10","title":"Taking the fun out of bird-watching: microphone array, beam-forming, and acoustic manifolds","subtitle":null,"slug":"emf2026-83-1-taking-the-fun-out-of-bird-watching-microphone-array","link":"https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/83-taking-the-fun-out-of-bird-watching-microphone-array","description":"For most bird-watchers, the fun part is watching birds in their natural habitat. For me it's all about the large-scale collection, analysis and visual representation of bird-song. \n\nIn this talk I'll show you what inspired this project: visually representing the complexity and beauty of bird-song. We'll start with the slightly janky hardware I built to collect the audio then move on to the processing pipeline that tries to find each bird in a tree. Finally, we get to see what an acoustic manifold looks like in 3D video form.\n\nA large, hacky, microphone array, an FPGA, verilog, high-speed USB, lots of Python and a lot of swearing at an AI.\n\nThis project was inspired by Lucio Arese's beautiful acoustic manifold videos: https://www.youtube.com/@lucioarese\n\nLicensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/","original_language":"eng","persons":["Mike Davis"],"view_count":28,"promoted":false,"date":"2026-07-19T12:50:00.000+02:00","release_date":"2026-07-19T00:00:00.000+02:00","updated_at":"2026-07-21T03:45:04.189+02:00","tags":["8301","2026","emf2026","talk","Stage A","emf2026-eng","Day 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