Hearing physiological data and acoustic feature data of vocalizations from hearing and deaf Egyptian fruit-bats

Description

This repository is a companion for the following article: Role of auditory feedback for vocal production learning in the Egyptian fruit-bat by Julie E Elie, Sandra E Muroy, Daria Genzel, Tong Na, Lisa A Beyer, Donald L Swiderski, Yehoash Raphael, Michael M Yartsev. Current Biology, 2024 In this paper we investigated how suppressing the sense of hearing would affect vocal production in the Egyptian fruit-bat. While bats are generally classified as vocal learners, which vocalizations are learned and which vocalizations are innate in their repertoire is unknown. Here we analyzed the vocal production of ten Egyptian fruit bats, five of which lost their hearing as pups. Because vocal learning necessitates the sense of hearing, vocalizations that are acquired by learning should be affected in deaf individuals. Vocalizations were recorded both by an ambient microphone and a piezo sensor (audio logger) carried by each individual, while the ten bats were freely interacting in their home environment. We show that a subset of the Egyptian fruit-bat vocal repertoire necessitates auditory feedback for normal production. Intriguingly, these affected vocalizations belong to different acoustic groups in the vocal repertoire of males and females. General Description of the data The present folder contains all the code to reproduce the results of the article and its figures, including intermediary data that are saved under the folder Data. Code files are given as Matlab notebooks or Matlab scripts. Notebook are also given as PDF for convenience. Data contains both Auditory Brain Responses measurements from the ten subject bats and acoustic measures made on vocalizations from these ten subjects. To reproduce the figures and explore the vocalization database the first step is to download the full library of bat vocalizations available under FigShare DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.25886023 The folder VocDataBase should be decompressed and place in the main folder of this repository. Dependencies The code uses several dependencies, the main ones are: the Python library soundsig available under https://github.com/theunissenlab/BioSoundTutorial the Matlab code for UMAP version 1.4.2 available under Mathworks file exchange: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/71902 the Matlab code version 1.1.0.0 for cubehelix available under Mathworks file exchange: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/43700-cubehelix-colormap-generator-beautiful-and-versatile The ReadMe file contains a description of each Matlab notebook and script.

Steps to reproduce

See original publication for further descriptions on how data was gathered.

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