Male songbirds produce songs that are critical for
competing with rivals and attracting mates. These songs
are learned: juveniles listen to surrounding adults,
memorize their songs, and produce imitations of the songs
they hear early in life. Fathers are supposed to be
important influences on their son's song development, but
this hypothesis remains controversial due to the
challenges of tracking what juveniles hear in nature.
My research group has recorded roughly 2 terabytes of
audio (approx 3000 hours) at the nests of approximately
175 nests of breeding pied flycatchers (svartvit
flugsnappare, Ficedula hypoleuca) in Sweden. We have
qualitatively demonstrated that fathers sing to their
offspring, but need to quantify how often, variation across
nests, and the type of songs males sing in order to
understand the potential impact on their offspring.
The amount of audio makes it impractical to manually
scan, so I have employed a full-time AI analyst from April
2024 - April 2025 to develop a machine learning model to
detect and classify songs from these recordings. The
analyst has substantial experience developing detection
models and the aim is to develop a well-functioning,
validated model over the next year.