Introduction

TalkBank Ethology Corpus: Field Recordings of Vervet Monkey Calls contains digitized audio files of field recordings of vervet monkeys (cercopithecus aethiops) collected by Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. 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, Dr. 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 sample audio file may be found here.

There are 60 annotation files containing approximately 1,270 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 ( ). A sample annotation may be found here.

Annotation files for the following audio files are not included in this publication: V08, V21, V42, V43, V44, V66, Vb1, Vb2, Vb3, Vb4, Vb5, Vb6, Vb7, Vb8, Vb9, Vc1, Vc2 and Vc3.

Software

The data/software directory contains a Windows version of the AGTK TableTrans tool for annotation of audio that was used in creating the annotations.

Requirements:

PC running Windows XP, Windows 2000 or WindowsNT

Installation:

The AGTK TableTrans1_2_2.exe file is a self-extracting installation program. Double clicking on the file will start the installation program.

Information:

Information about the AGTK (the Annotation Graph Toolkit) project is available at:

http://agtk.sf.net/

Updates

None at this time.

Sponsorship

The publication of the Field Recordings of Vervet Monkey Calls was funded in part through a five-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.

Content Copyright

Portions © 1977-1978, 2001-2004, Robert M. Seyfarth, Dorothy L. Cheney, © 2004 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania