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by kmundnic 2492 days ago
There's certainly interest on this topic from the neuroscience community. At least for mice vocalizations, the first (unsolved) problem is to find a dictionary of possible vocalizations. This is a highly non-trivial problem, mainly because it depends on having a good similarity between (noisy) vocalizations, but also because we don't have a ground truth or gold standard.

The vocalizations vary between strains, and some of them are more less clean than others in their spectrogram representations. Different strains vocalize in different frequency ranges.

Assuming that you've found a dictionary, then you'd have to learn how to map dictionary elements to behavior. Behavior labeling is done by human annotators that spend hundreds (or more) hours looking at mice behavior and learning how to identify different these. This, by nature, is a noisy process as well (and possibly biased).

Given the difficulties, the problem itself is very useful for people in neuroscience because mice only vocalize in social situations, so they see it as a window into studying social behavior of, for example, mice with autistic behavior.

Edit: grammar

1 comments

Do you know if anything similar is being done with any sort of birdsong?
Yes, with zebra finches, bengalese finches, and starlings, among others.