Continuing on the bouba/kiki effect thread, I thought some might appreciate this visualization, though I'm unsure of a more concrete method for tying it into my own practice (yet).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYCX1WpXEAcYphG?format=jpg&name=small

via

pic.twitter.com/xDfBj3mxon

— Alex Tomlinson 🪶 (@hootalex) July 19, 2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

The bouba/kiki effect might be an interesting thing to use for memorizing birdsong patterns.

I was at the bookstore yesterday and ran into two new useful resources that looked interesting in this space.

Specific to birdsong, there was

200 Bird Songs from Around the World by Les Beletsky (Becker & Mayer, 2020, ISBN: ‎ 978-0760368831)

Read about and listen to birds from six continents. A beautiful painting illustrates each selection along with concise details about the bird's behavior, environment, and vocalizations. On the built-in digital audio player, hear each bird as it sings or calls in nature with audio of the birds provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

This could be useful in using the book itself as a memory palace in addition to the fact that the bird calls are built directly into the book for immediate playback while reading/memorizing. There are a few other related books with built in sound in this series as well.

The other broader idea was that of

"A bird a day"

I saw the book A Bird A Day by Dominic Couzens (Batsford, 2021, ISBN: 978-1849945868) to help guide one towards learning about (or in our context maybe memorizing) a bird a day. It had names, photos, and other useful information which one might use to structure a palace to work at in small chunks. I know there are also many other related calendars which might also help one do something like this to build up a daily practice of memorizing data into a palace/journey/songline.

The broader "Thing-a-day" calendar category might also be useful for other topics one might want to memorize as well as to have a structure set up for encouraging spaced repetition.

@doughoff Thanks for kicking this off. I'm relieved to see someone else occupied (personally I'm worried) with this topic.

I've recently begun some work on memorizing birds in North America. Bird song is one of the more intimidating areas for me as I have absolutely zero knowledge of music beyond a pair of functioning ears.

In my early searches for a comprehensive text to work from, I did note that the book Birds of North America (Golden Field Guides series) by Chandler S. Robbins, & Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim (St. Martin's Press, 2001) was one of the few guides that dealt with birdsong and had a short section on the subject in the front and listed visual sonograms for most birds. Sadly, the book didn't include audio which I think may have been incredibly helpful in matching the sound with the visuals.

I have bookmarked a few websites that deal with it, though there are sure to be many others that match birdsong audio to a visual representation of some sort. Here are a few of those:

• http://earbirding.com/blog/archives/category/spectrograms
• https://www.audubon.org/news/start-using-spectrograms-read-bird-songs-and-calls
• http://donaldkroodsma.com/?page_id=49

Initially I imagined that through direct experience in listening and viewing these sonograms, I might come to some sort of facility with them. Next I would potentially rely on the concept of pareidolia to come up with some images to attach to them.

In any case, I thought I'd sketch out my general plan and some of the resources and words I'd come across to see if they may be of help to others. I'm looking forward to seeing what others may have come up with or used as well. Birdsong will assuredly be the last piece of the puzzle that I build into my bird repertoire.

Incidentally, after having done some significant library searching and bird guide/handbook review, I've chosen Birds of North America, Francois Vuilleumier (Dorling Kindersley, 2020, ISBN:978-0-7440-2053-3) as my "bible" for it's structuring of bird families, photographs, descriptions, and variety of data about birds and their ranges. It's about as comprehensive (for my area of the world) as anything out there, is well laid out, and sort of makes its own method of loci based on page layouts and color schemes. It is too large to take out into the field easily, but I find that working on storing the data is easier in the comfort of the house than the wilderness.

I'll also note that it has representative visual flight diagrams which may be relatively easy to categorize and therefore memorize bird flight patterns. If others have better or more detailed resources for this, I'd love to know those as well.