Annotated recordings of two captive groups of rooks, with individual identity and context

This dataset was used in our paper "Vocal complexity in a socially complex corvid: gradation, diversity, and lack of common call repertoire in male rooks" (DOI will be added on publication).

If you use this dataset in your work, please cite the article (citation to be added on publication).

The dataset includes audio recording (stored in "audio.zip") and annotations (stored in "labels.zip" and "clean labels.zip), collected  between 2020 and 2022 in two captive groups of rooks in outdoor aviaries, one in Strasbourg (France) and one in Cambridge (UK). The audio was compressed losslessly to FLAC files from the original uncompressed WAV to fit with the Zenodo 50GB limit. They can be converted back to WAV with the Python soundfile package or with FFMPEG from the command line if needed (though some conversion will probably fail due to the ~4GB file size limit on WAV).

NOTE: To ease checking data formatting without downloading the entire dataset, the "example.zip" folder contains one audio file and its associated annotations.

Two different versions of the annotations files are included: "clean_labels.zip" includes the TSV files used in the analysis for the paper, and "labels.zip" includes the TXT files used for annotation, which can be opened along with the audio files in the Audacity software for reviewing. Each audio file corresponds to one TXT and one TSV file, with corresponding files sharing the same filename. Filename format is 'YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS(_StartXXXX)', meaning the date and time of the beginning of the recording; optionally, "StartXXXX" means that the original recording was split into multiple files, with each file starting XXXX seconds after the start of the original recording.

TSV annotations include, for each recorded rook vocalisations: time stamps (Start, End columns), emitter identity (Source column), context of emission (Event column; these annotations are often abbreviations, but the most important distinction is between calls and songs, denoted by the presence or absence of "sing" in the Event cell). and additional comments (Comment column). Special cases for annotations include Inc (unknown single individual vocalised but could not be identified), Pls (several individuals vocalised but overlapped too much to be separated), Comment (for events of note that were not vocalisations), and Ignore (this was used for sections that could not be checked for annotations for any reason; vocalisations may be included but were not annotated).

TXT annotations include the same information but the Source and Event columns are merged and the corresponding Comments are additional markers between the vocalisation timestamps, to be compatible with Audacity. This is best viewed in the example file.

Additional info regarding the individuals can be found in Table S1 of the paper.

The code used for the analysis is hosted at https://gitlab.com/kimartin/cluster_rook_vocs.

For questions on the dataset, please reach out to [e-mail]