“Ficedula”: An open-source MATLAB toolbox for cutting, segmenting and computer-aided clustering of bird song

Sándor Zsebők*, György Blázi, Miklós Laczi, Gergely Nagy, Éva Vaskuti, László Zsolt Garamszegi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Qualitative and quantitative assessments of bird song repertoires are important in studies related to song learning, sexual selection and cultural evolution. Despite methods for automatic analysis, it is still necessary to engage in manual cutting, segmenting and clustering of bird song elements in many cases. Here, we describe a program, the Ficedula Toolbox, which has been made available for free to the bird song research community and has recently come into extensive use. The main advantages of this package are the opportunity to conduct all processing steps in one framework and the option of carrying out computer-aided manual clustering. Output files are ready for further analyses, such as estimation of repertoire size, sequential analysis and repertoire overlap calculation. With this program, findings based on empirical data from the Collared Flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) song show high inter-observer similarity, and thus, reproducible results. The toolbox may be especially applicable to the analysis of song in species with moderately high repertoires.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1105-1111
Number of pages7
JournalJournal of Ornithology
Volume159
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Bird song analysis
  • Computer-aided manual clustering
  • Repertoire overlap
  • Sound analysis software
  • Syllable repertoire size

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of '“Ficedula”: An open-source MATLAB toolbox for cutting, segmenting and computer-aided clustering of bird song'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this