Taking the fun out of bird-watching: microphone array, beam-forming, and acoustic manifolds (emf2026)

For most bird-watchers, the fun part is watching birds in their natural habitat. For me it's all about the large-scale collection, analysis and visual representation of bird-song. In this talk I'll show you what inspired this project: visually representing the complexity and beauty of bird-song. We'll start with the slightly janky hardware I built to collect the audio then move on to the processing pipeline that tries to find each bird in a tree. Finally, we get to see what an acoustic manifold looks like in 3D video form. A large, hacky, microphone array, an FPGA, verilog, high-speed USB, lots of Python and a lot of swearing at an AI. This project was inspired by Lucio Arese's beautiful acoustic manifold videos: https://www.youtube.com/@lucioarese Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/83-taking-the-fun-out-of-bird-watching-microphone-array