As sort of a hearing aid for birdwatchers, the Songfinder and Songfinder Plus can take bird and insect songs that occur in higher frequency ranges and pitch shift them via a variety of methods, including frequency division by user-selected degrees, making the high-pitched calls of birds audible to those who may have lost sensitivity in later years. Not only that, but the Songfinder works binaurally to provide realistic 3-dimensional sound by placing a microphone in the earpiece of each headset, processing the sound that travels to each ear separately before feeding it back to the user. Since much of the point of listening to bird calls is to be able to spot them, having directional sound mixed back in is critical. Still, as cool as it seems, the price tag definitely takes the Songfinder out of the range of the casual birdwatcher, as the basic model is sold for $750 and the advanced Plus model sells for $900. I'm sure there's some DSP magic happening in there that I don't know about, but that's a lot of skrilla for a fancy amplifier. (Thanks, Tom!)
Read [NatureSound]
[Gizmodo]
My mother would love this gizmo as she's an avid birder. But I mostly posted this as a test of the w.bloggar plugin for SharpReader.
