Bird Sounds

I wrote this small flask app to help me practice bird sound identification. It is neither advanced nor beautiful, but it gets the job done. I am sharing the code here just in case anybody else would find it useful.

Environment

It is recommended to run the app in a conda environment. Create one and activate it:

$ conda env create -f conda.yaml
$ conda activate bird-sounds

Metadata

Now go ahead and fill out metadata/selection.json with information about the species and the sounds you would like to download. This repository comes with a curated set of sound. Here is an example with just one species:

$ cat metadata/selection.json
{
    "Parus major": {
        "translations": {
            "danish": "Musvit",
            "english": "Great Tit"
        },
        "sounds": {
            "song": {
                "709733": [1000, 3500]
            }
        }
    }
}

In this example, the sound XC709733 is dowloaded and cropped to the interval from 1 to 3.5 seconds. To download sounds (already downloaded sounds will not be re-downloaded) and update the database, simply run python download.py.

Running

To run the app, you must first tell flask which app to use. The default vernacular language is Danish. If you want a different language, this is the place to specify it, too.

$ export FLASK_APP=app
$ export VERNACULAR_LANGUAGE=english

Now the app is lauched using flask run and can be accessed in a browser using the address provided in the output:

$ flask run
* Serving Flask app 'app.py' (lazy loading)
* Environment: production
  WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment.
  Use a production WSGI server instead.
* Debug mode: off
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

The app plays a random bird sound and offers all possible species in the database as choices. Make a guess by clicking on a species name. The app then shows the correct species and allows you to replay the sound. Click on the species name again to get a new sound.