Language is perhaps the only behavior unique to humans, although several other clades of animals similarly learn to vocalize through a process of trial-and-error learning mediated by social interactions. It is hotly debated whether language and vocal learning are best understood as a spectrum, or rather a set of multi-dimensional cognitive functions. Scientists ranging from Chomsky, Fitch, Hauser, Jackendoff and Pinker in the early 2000s to a broad swath of researchers studying vocal learning today have argued that the best way to can understand the origins of language and related abilities in other animals is to take a big team science approach, broadly comparative, with truly integrative work across disciplines, including genetics, physiology, neuroscience, ecology and evolution, to name just a few. We call this field of study vocal behavior, meaning "the study of animal vocalizations, especially as it relates to speech". Of course we recognize huge overlap with animal communication and bioacoustics, but we assert that understanding the origin of language requires a specialized approach.
Additionally, we propose that the study of vocal behavior requires a software community, in the same way that astronomy has the astropy project, high-energy physics has scikit-HEP, and bioinformatics has bioconda, again to give just a few of many examples. There has been a recent explosion of software, behavioral models, and datasets targeted at researchers studying vocal behavior. This has resulted in a situation similar to the beginnings of the astropy ecosystem, where there is reduplicatin of effort, and multiple tools offering similar but not completely overlapping functionality. To demonstrate that this is an exponentially grouwing software community, and to illustrate the need for a more organized and cohesive effort among all researchers in that community, we provide here a site with software tools, behavioral models, and publicly-available datasets. We welcome contributions to this site through the Google Form or GitHub pull requests. For a proof-of-concept version of a core software community designed by and for researchers studying vocal behavior, please see: https://github.com/vocalpy. Papers in progress describe the need for this software community and the design of VocalPy, and we are open to contributions to both.
A recent review that is particularly relevant:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.811737/full
See also this special issue of Royal Society Proceedings B: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2021/376/1836
https://github.com/BirdVox/BirdVox_datasets
data-wrangling scripts put together by the BirdVox team
https://github.com/kylebgorman/textgrid
for working with Praat TextGrid files in Python
https://github.com/aemarse/xeno-canto-python
https://github.com/davipatti/birdbrain
Looks like it has a nice class-based approach to accessing Xeno-Canto through their API
http://taylor0.biology.ucla.edu/birdDBQuery/
https://wp.nyu.edu/birdvox/codedata/#datasets
http://dcase.community/challenge2018/task-bird-audio-detection#audio-datasets
Birdsong Audio Detection challenge. Has several datasets recorded
in diverse conditions to enable testing how well models generalize.
"Bengalese Finch song repository"
https://figshare.com/articles/Bengalese_Finch_song_repository/4805749
"BirdsongRecognition"
https://figshare.com/articles/BirdsongRecognition/3470165
"Data from: A simple explanation for the evolution of complex song syntax in Bengalese finches"
https://datadryad.org//resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.6pt8g
Global Song Library:
http://songbirdscience.com/resources/behavior/global-song-library
"Data from: Horizontal transmission of the father’s song in the Zebra Finch (Taeniopygia guttata)"
https://datadryad.org//resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.7137r
Williams, H. (1997) Zebra Finch Song Archive.
"The songs archived here are the minimal length necessary to show all of the syllables sung by a given bird."
i.e. there is only one .wav file per bird
http://web.williams.edu/Biology/Faculty_Staff/hwilliams/ZFsongs/
Hedley, Richard (2016):
Data used in PLoS One article
"Complexity, Predictability and Time Homogeneity of Syntax in the Songs of Cassin’s Vireo (Vireo cassini)"
by Hedley (2016). figshare.
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3081814.v1
For a much more general site for anyone working in bioacoustics, please see the excellent site organized by Tessa Rhinehart: https://github.com/rhine3/bioacoustics-software
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