Bird Idol
About
Bird Idol is an interactive song building program that was designed by Dr Karen Spencer (University of Glasgow) and Dr George Lovell (University of Bristol). The game allows you to build a song out of 9 different sub-units (also called syllables) and pretend you are a male bird. These syllables have been recorded from real birds and players get the chance to construct a real canary song. Players can also compete against another player for the affections of a female canary. The female makes her decision based upon what we know about the mating bird mind and how females decide which song charactersitics reveal the quality of the male.
This program was designed to introduce the basic concepts of pitch, frequency and song complexity to younger students. Older students have found this useful in understanding the ideas behind sexual selection and the evolution of mate choice. It is aimed at students and teachers alike, and was showcased at the Charles Darwin Award Lecture given by Dr Spencer as part of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s National Festival of Science in York (9th – 15th September 2007).
Bird Idol was featured on BBC Radio 4’s The Material World on 13th September. Ahead of her lecture, Dr Spencer spoke to Quentin Cooper about her research, and played Bird Idol to illustrate the point!
The ptolemy.co.uk implementation added rich graphical content, animation, and an interactive interface design in a fun and lively way, in order to capture and retain students’ attention and to add humour.
Instructions for Use
A set of simple instructions are availble in PDF format in the Bird Idol Instruction Manual. These include both a getting started guide and some clues as to how to maximise your male canary sexiness!
Flash
Bird Idol was developed in Flash and is redistributed using both Flash and AIR.
If you are browsing to this page, or you intend to use Bird Idol only in those situations where there is an active internet connection, then you should use the online Flash version of Bird Idol.
If you choose the Flash option then Flash will run in your browser. However, you can still use it in full-screen by clicking on this full-screen icon. It may take a second or two to initialise, depending upon your browser. To cancel full-screen, press the escape key.
Adobe Integrated Runtime
If you foresee situations in which you may want to use Bird Idol in a situation where there is no internet connection, then you can download the AIR version.
If you have never installed an AIR application before, you will need to first install the Adobe AIR Platform. This only needs to be done once for all Adobe AIR applications. Once the the AIR platform is installed, you can open the downloaded file BirdIdol.air, and you will then be presented with the dialog on the right.
At the time of publishing, Adobe AIR was extremely new and publishers could not be ‘verified’. When installing, Adobe AIR warns users that the application may access your internet or hard drive. I can assure you that Bird Idol does neither.
