Home page of the Talkbank Ethology Corpus: Field Recordings of Vervet Monkey Calls


This page will contain news and information about the LDC Publication: "Talkbank Ethology Corpus: Field Recordings of Vervet Monkey Call". Software updates, documentation updates, annotation updates and other informations will be uploaded here.

Corpus Availability

Talkbank Ethology Data: Field Recordings of Vervet Monkeys was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), catalog number LDC2004S12 and ISBN 1-58563-312-7.

To obtain this corpus, please visit this page: Obtaining Data at the LDC web site.

This data publication contains digitized audio files of field recordings of vervet monkey (cercopithecus aethiops) calls collected by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy 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, Robert 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.

Use of Data: Please Read

If you plan to use these calls for teaching or acoustic analysis, please contact Robert Seyfarth or Dorothy Cheney who will be happy to give their permission. Robert and Dorothy can also offer provide information about their coding scheme and explain all of the conditions under which calls were recorded and labeled.