Automatic identification of bird species based on sinusoidal modeling of syllables

Syllables are elementary building blocks of bird song. In the sounds of many songbirds, a large class of syllables can be approximated as amplitude and frequency varying brief sinusoidal pulses. We test how well bird species can be recognized by comparing simple sinusoidal representations of isolated syllables. Results are encouraging and show that, with limited sets of bird species, a recognizer based on this signal model may already be sufficient.