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Dryad

Sex differences in the song circuit and song acoustic complexity in male and female house wrens

Abstract

In this study, we compared neural song circuit morphology to singing behavior recorded in the field for 17 male and 18 female house wrens. The acoustic complexity of house wren songs was quantified using a recently published machine learning approach. This data set includes recordings of all house wren songs used in this analysis along with Raven selection tables defining the boundaries of each syllable. This includes 109 female songs. R code used to extract acoustic features and estimate element diversity and our proxy for song acoustic complexity are included. Summaries of acoustic variables for each song and each element are provided as well as files necessary to replicate the analysis. For each bird, we measured volume, cell number, cell density, and neuron soma size for three song circuits, Area X, HVC (used as a proper name), and the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA), and one control region, the nucleus rotundus (Rt). This data set includes these neural morphology measurements for each bird as well as R code used to (1) compare males and females for each neural measurement and (2) explore the relationship between acoustic complexity and neural morphology within each sex.