It is perhaps important to start with the fact that I am a complete beginner in DSP. I have got a number of audio recordings (of sampling rate 22 kHz) - of bird songs - which I have been trying to analyse using FFT (in Matlab/Octave). Particularly, I am trying to show using Machine Learning classification algorithms that different classes of those recordings have prominence of different frequencies (or frequency ranges). The recordings are of variable length and, due to computation limitations, the largest size FFT that I can do is 2^19 (which I understand is the number of points it takes from each audio file). So, my first question is: if I break my recordings in parts, each corresponding to the size of FFT that I've chosen - would it be still reasonable to treat those parts as separate data examples (i.e. separate recordings), and what kind of information do I lose when splitting the larger recordings in such way?
The second question is: is there a better way for a beginner to perform this analysis, in a not so computationally expensive way, since I think working with vectors of size 2^18+1 is not really the best thing to do in the current case.