Song Sleuth Is Suggesting Species That Sound Completely Different From What I Recorded. What's Wrong?

The app is a computer program, and is using a strictly analytical approach to sound pattern matching. This means that it can return results that seem nonsensical from our perspective. Usually this is because there is some extraneous noise in the recording, and the app will sometimes suggest either very low-pitched sounds (e.g. Mourning Dove, Human, etc) or very high-pitched sounds (e.g. Cedar Waxwing, Black-capped Chickadee, etc) when we clearly hear something else.

In other recordings there might be confusing sounds before or after the target sound. In both cases, using the Isolate Song interface will significantly improve your results. Drag the corners of the blue box to highlight a short phrase of the song you are interested, excluding noise from other areas of the frequency spectrum and from before or after the song.

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