Build your own bird detector! Learn step by step to build a fully customised animal sounds monitoring device, trained on a local dataset. This workshop is for bird nerds, sound wizards, and for those who are into DYI and low-tech solutions. New to all this? That’s great: coding experience is useful, but not required.
The workshop will be based on the bird detector developed by Matteo Holyoke Marangoni (@matteo_h_marangoni) for the project Chorusing Symbionts. He combines music with visual art, theatre, and new technologies. He develops robotic instruments and artificial creatures to compose spaces in which sound is experienced with the whole body and all the senses. His work draws inspiration from animal communication, bioacoustics, and ecoacoustics, exploring how sound can mediate relationships between humans, machines, and other life forms, and proposing embodied and ecological notions of intelligence, consciousness and subjecthood.
The workshop will cover the process from data collection and data preparation with the use of BirdNET and python scrips, to model training with Edge Impulse and deployment on the Arduino platform with an ESP32 microcontroller. A conceptual overview will be accompanied by hands on work. For the hands on component previous experience with python, Visual Studio Code and Arduino is recommended.