Talkbank Ethology Corpus: Field Recordings of Vervet Monkey Calls

Introduction

Talkbank Ethology Corpus: Field Recordings of Vervet Monkey Calls was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), catalog number LDC2004S12 and ISBN 1-58563-312-7.

This data publication contains digitized audio files of field recordings of vervet monkey (cercopithecus aethiops) calls collected by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney in 1977 and 1978. The original recordings were made on 1/8 inch reel-to-reel tapes, and were digitized at LDC using the sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz. This publication contains downsampled versions of the recordings.

From 2001 through 2004, Robert Seyfarth and one of his students annotated the recordings for the following fields: start time, end time, type (Bout, Commentary, etc.), recording date and time, caller ID, recipient ID, context, call type and remarks. This publication contains annotation files that can be viewed with the accompanying software, or with spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel.

Data

There are 60 audio files (approximately 5 GB), containing approximately 30 hours of recordings. All of the audio files are in the Microsoft WAV format with the sampling frequency of 22,050 Hz, a half of the sampling frequncy of the audio CD format. These audio files are in the Seyfarth media directory.

There are 60 annotation files containing approximately 1270 annotations of selected audio files in the distributions. All of the annotation files are tab-separated table files without a header, and use the UNIX-style newline ("\n"). These annotation files are in the data/annotations directory.

Annotation files and audio files for the following tapes are not included in this publication: V08, V21, V42, V43, V44 and V66. They may become available later from the LDC Vervet Monkey Corpus Homepage.

Use of Data

If you plan to use these calls for teaching or acoustic analysis, please contact Robert Seyfarth or Dorothy Cheney who will be happy to give their permission. Robert and Dorothy can also offer provide information about their coding scheme and explain all of the conditions under which calls were recorded and labeled.

Software

This publication includes software tools for browsing the conents of the corpus. The current tools included in this publication are for Windows PC platforms only. For information on the software tools, please see the docs/software.html file.

For a complete listing of the files please see file.tbl in the docs directory.

Updates

Additional information, updates, bug fixes and supporting software tools may be available at the LDC Vervet Monkey Corpus Homepage.

Please contact Kazuaki Maeda with any questions regarding this corpus.

License Agreement

Due to restrictions imposed by copyright issues and third-party sources, all LDC corpora are governed by some kind of user license agreement. If you are a member of the LDC, your use of LDC corpora (barring any specialized corpus license) is governed by a Membership License Agreement. Please see your company or department administrator for a copy of this license or find the appropriate agreement on the LDC website.

If you or your organization are not a member of the LDC, then this corpus is governed by the following LDC End User License Agreement for Non-Members.

Certain LDC corpora are governed by a specialized End User License Agreement which supersedes any other member or non-member license agreements. This corpus does not require any specialized license.

Sponsorship

The publication of the Field Recordings of Vervet Monkey Calls was funded in part through a 5-year grant (BCS-998009, KDI, SBE) from the National Science Foundation via TalkBank, an interdisciplinary project to foster research and development in communicative behavior by providing tools and standards for analysis and distribution of language and animal communication data.