Simultaneous extracellular recordings of avian auditory neurons in freely behaving zebra finches presented with all the repertoire of vocalizations used by this species for vocal communication

These data consist of neurophysiological and audio recordings from 2 male and 2 female zebra finches performed by Hermina Robotka and Frédéric Theunissen in the laboratory of Manfred Gahr at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (Seewiesen, Germany; now called MPI for Biological Intelligence). The stimuli consist of multiple examples of multiple renditions of the ten call types of the bird’s repertoire as well as song and temporally and spectrally filtered song. The waveforms of the sound stimulus in these playback experiments as well as the recorded sounds are included in the data set. The stimulus is also labeled according to its call type. These extracellular neural recordings were obtained using 16 electrode arrays manufactured by Microprobe. The recordings were performed in freely behaving birds that were housed in pairs and could both respond to the playback or exchange communication calls. Recordings lasted approximately 4 weeks for each bird. The neural data has been preprocessed and only includes spike arrival times during the stimulus presentation (including 500 ms before and until 4.5 s after stimulus onset). The electrode arrays targeted the primary (field L, CLM) and secondary (NCM and CMM) auditory pallial areas. The raw neural data (in the form or Intan rhd files) is available upon request. The processed data is provided here as Python objects using the pickle protocol. Single pickle files include all the playback data for a single spike sorted unit. A Jupyter notebook is provided to read and display the data. The notebook includes a GUI that allows the user to upload a specific unit from a specific electrode and find all trials obtained in response to a specific stimulus. Results from the experiments are described in: Sparse Ensemble Neural Code for a Complete Vocal Repertoire Robotka H, Thomas L, Yu K, Wood W, Elie JE, Gahr M and Theunissen FE Cell Reports (in press) doi: tbd