Separation slang - Laboratory mice use low-frequency call repertoire during physical separation - Audio recordings and spectrograms of single calls

The discovery of a diverse repertoire of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) sparked interest in understanding their role in mouse social behavior. Social communication in mice is not just vocal, but multimodal and occurs mostly in close proximity. Aiming to unravel the impact direct physical interaction has on the vocal communication of same-sex mouse dyads, we separated mice through a divider preventing direct physical interaction, but allowing visual, olfactory and some tactile interaction through holes. Separated dyads emitted a distinct call repertoire consisting mainly of calls in or just above the human audible range (but not squeaks) as well as Noisy calls, and only to a lesser degree of USVs.

This dataset contains sound recordings of single mouse calls as well as their spectrograms as images. The sound recordings were digitized with a sampling rate of 384 kHz. The spectrogram images were generated using MatLab's 'spectrogram' function (Signal Processing Toolbox) with parameters chosen analogously to DeepSqueak: window = hamming(11520 samples), noverlap = 10752 samples, nfft = 11520 samples. Thus, spectrograms' appearance is similar to the appearance of spectrograms in DeepSqueak, which were used for call detection.

Data is stored according to experiments. Within each experiment folder data is organized according to mouse pair, giving no. and sex of the pair (e.g. 276_f for female pair no. 276). Within each mouse pair folder, the 'spectrograms' folder contains spectrogram images (.png) that are named with an ascending no. and the call class they belong to (e.g. 1_Noisy.png). A second folder 'wav_snippets' contains the audio recordings of each single mouse call, the snippets are named either 'USV-Nr.ascending no..wav' or 'Call No.ascending no..wav' (e.g. USV-Nr.0001.wav or Call No.0001.wav). The ascending no. of the .wav files corresponds to the ascending no. of the spectrogram images, i.e. the sound file to spectrogram image '1_Noisy.png' is 'USV-Nr.0001.wav' or 'Call No.0001.wav, depending on the naming scheme used.

The archive 'FVB_small-holes_untreated.tar.gz' contains data from sighted FVB mouse pairs emitted during separation through a plexiglass divider with small boreholes, as well as calls emitted after removing the divider and organized in folders 'separated' and 'united', respectively.

The archive 'B6J_CBA_mice.tar.gz' contains audio recordings and spectrogram images of separated same-sex mouse pairs of either the C57BL/6J (B6J) or the CBA/J (CBA) strain. 

The archive 'large_holes_no-holes.tar.gz' contains audio recordings and spectrogram images of calls of same-sex, sighted FVB mouse pairs separated either by a divider with large boreholes or no boreholes.

The archive 'Buspirone.tar.gz' contains audio recordings and spectrogram images of calls of sighted FVB, same-sex mouse pairs that were exposed to the separation context twice with the second exposure occuring three days after the first. Mouse pairs were divided into two groups, the first group received physiological saline before the first exposure and the anxiolytic 5-HT1A receptor agonist buspirone before the second exposure (saline-buspirone group). The second group received buspirone before the firt exposure and physiological saline before the second exposure (buspirone-saline group).