Example annotations of vocal activity in data from singly housed male zebra finches

This guideline provides an educational resource for detecting and annotating vocalizations of male zebra finches. The main purpose of this guideline is to instruct the reader how to detect and annotate the onsets and offsets as well as the frequency range of zebra finch vocalizations from sound spectrograms. By studying this document and the associated example annotations, we hope to minimize the annotation variance among annotators on larger datasets of this kind to be published.

The birds in this data set have been singly housed in soundproof boxes and have been longitudinally recorded with a microphone while they grew up and learned a song. As a song template, there was daily playback through a loudspeaker of a sound file synthesized from natural song (the playbacks are not part of this resource).

We acknowledge support of the National Science Foundation NCCR Evolving Language, Agreement #51NF40_180888.