Sound spectra from study of Great Bowerbird bower male sound arrival in bower avenue

Sexual selection can result in extreme development of multimodal mate-attracting traits, including complex constructions.  Male great bowerbirds build bowers for attracting females.  Bowers contain a thatched twig tunnel (avenue) opening onto two courts covered with decorations.  Males displaying on a court are seen by a female from within the avenue.  She sees and hears displays through the avenue entrance but can only see the male's head and objects in his bill as it passes repeatedly across the entrance.  Because the bower may affect the auditory as well as the visual parts of the multimodal male display we investigated bower acoustic properties by playing standard sounds from multiple court positions, recording the resulting sounds at the female's head position within the avenue.  Bower geometry results in a limited zone at the avenue entrance where his vocalisations can be heard with maximum intensity; this corresponds to his typical display position.  Experiments show that court d..., We played spectrally flat standard sounds from various positions on the bower court, where the male displays visually and auditorally, with a microphone at the female's head position within the bower avenue.  This yielded sound spectra and total intensity as a function of direction and distance from the bower avenue entrance as well as what was on the bower court, with locations with no bower as controls.
The standard sounds were either white noise or a spectral sweep, bandwidth 2 to 20 kHz, both generated in MATLAB.  The bandwidth includes all frequencies recorded in natural male soundss recorded by us and by others.  These sounds were played back from a Marantz PMD661 digital recorder.
For bowers the speaker (Second Marantz PMD661 experiments 1,3, and Bose Revolve II SoundLink experiments 2,4) was placed at the avenue entrance (position 1) and at two more distant positions on the court (25 and 50 cm from position 1) at 0 degrees (avenue axis), 45 degrees left and right and 90 degrees ..., , # Sound Spectra used in the analysis

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6djh9w19w](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6djh9w19w)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data are in the form of spectra and totals corrected for position 1 (bower avenue entrance) in .csv format.

## **List of files and experiments**

**Geo2021StDirectionalSpectralData.csv**:  EXPERIMENT 1, directional geometry (spectra)

**Geo2021StDirectionalIntensityData.csv**:  EXPERIMENT 1, directional geometry as intensity

**Geo2023StSpectraBwrOrCt.csv**:   EXPERIMENT 2, omnidirectional geometry

**CtSeqRm2017ObjectExperiment25-50St.csv**:  EXPERIMENT 3, directional progressive object removal

**CtRm2023-StSpectraBeforeAfter25and50cm.csv**: EXPERIMENT 4, omnidirectional gesso removal

**Variables in each file:**

**Geo2021StDirectionalSpectralData.csv**

Site: bower number
BorC: bower or open (no bower)
Position: position relative to avenue entrance
x,y: cartesian location of each position relative to posit...