How to use Syrinx 3D
Syrinx takes a recording of a bird, names the species, cuts the recording into its individual calls, and places every call in a three-dimensional space where calls that sound alike end up near each other. Nothing here needs an account, and the analysis runs on your own device.
The same guide is inside the app: press ? at any time.
Getting a recording analysed
- 1
Pick a sound
Library tab: load any of the real bird recordings in one click. Or Analyze tab: drop your own WAV, MP3, FLAC or video, or record with the microphone. Or Live: build the manifold while you listen.
- 2
Press play
The spheres appear in time with the song. Every sphere is one call: size is loudness, colour is the measurement in the legend (spectral spread by default), thin lines trace the order the calls were sung. Similar calls sit close together.
- 3
Explore
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, hover a sphere for its numbers, click it to hear it. Use the palette button to choose what the axes mean (similarity, frequency map, timeline) and how the spheres look.
- 4
Name and tag
Call types are named automatically from their sound; double-click a name in the legend to rename it. Tag what the bird was doing in the Inspector, or live while recording, and the matrix and the learning engine turn those tags into predictions.
- 5
Present and export
P gives a clean full-screen view with the play bar. Export shares the data as JSON, CSV, Raven tables, or a zip with the audio.
What each part of the screen is for
- Manifold
- Every call as a lit sphere in 3D. Colour modes top left, size modes and the look panel top right, legend on the left, and the transport along the bottom plays the whole recording.
- Multiscale
- Five charts that all fill in as the recording plays: tonality (any three measurements as axes), 3D spectrogram, syntax ribbon, song manifold and transition network. “All” shows four at once.
- Record
- The manifold builds itself from the microphone. Press Start recording; the first two seconds calibrate to the room. Calls are measured the moment they end, grouped into named call types, and BirdNET names the species with a picture. Tap a behaviour to log it; Stop & analyse turns the last two minutes into a full session with those tags attached.
- Spectrogram, along the bottom
- Playback controls and speed, scroll to zoom, drag to pan, click a box to play that one call. “Energy” shows the detection curve the segmenter is actually using.
- Inspector, on the right
- Context for the selected call type. Calls (split merged calls or merge fragments, choose how many call types, set the song gap); Species with pictures; the call type list (rename, auto-name, hide, play); the learning engine; the translation matrix; syntax; layout.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Space | Play / pause the whole recording (spheres appear as it plays) |
| [ and ] | Previous / next call (plays it) |
| 1 – 8 | Colour by spread, centroid, duration, level, call type, behaviour, species, phrase |
| R | Reveal on play on / off |
| T | Sequence lines on / off |
| L | Call type names in the scene |
| B | Cycle the backdrop (studio, space, paper) |
| P | Presentation mode (full screen, clean); Esc leaves it |
| C | Switch between the manifold and the multi-scale charts |
| I | Show / hide the inspector |
| V | Show / hide the synced video |
| ? | This guide |
| Esc | Clear the selection |
Shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in a text field.
When something goes wrong
- The microphone will not start
- A browser only hands over the microphone on a secure connection and only after you allow it, and it will not ask twice. If you dismissed the prompt, open the padlock in the address bar, set Microphone to Allow, and reload. On a phone, close any other app that is holding the microphone first — a call or a voice recorder keeps it to itself.
- It found no calls, or one long call instead of many
- Calls are found by energy, so a recording where the bird is quieter than the background gives the segmenter nothing to cut on. Open the Calls panel in the Inspector: lowering the threshold finds quieter calls, and the split and merge controls fix a run that was cut into fragments or glued into one. If the whole recording is hiss, no setting will rescue it; get closer and record again.
- The species name looks wrong
- It is a suggestion, not a determination. Accuracy falls with distance, wind, traffic and overlapping birds, and two species that genuinely sound alike will confuse the model the way they confuse a person. The cheapest checks are range and season: if the bird does not occur where you are standing, in the month you are standing there, the name is wrong no matter how confident it looks.
- Nothing happens when I drop a file in
- WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG, AIFF, M4A, WebM and the common video containers all work, and a video is read for its audio track. Anything longer than ten minutes is analysed up to that point, because the whole analysis runs on your own device and ten minutes is where a phone stops being pleasant. Trim a long recording to the part with the bird in it.
- It is slow, or the fans come on
- The 3D scene and the analysis both run locally. A long recording with hundreds of calls is genuinely a lot of spheres. Presentation mode (P) and switching off sequence lines (T) both help, and a shorter clip helps most.
- Where do my recordings go
- Onto your own device, and nowhere else unless you choose to send them. Species naming is the one step that can use the server, and the offline library of 197 species is bundled with the Android app so it works with no connection at all.
Still stuck
Syrinx is made by one person, and a description of what you did and what happened instead is genuinely useful. Write to [email protected].