A complete syllable dictionary for Serinus canarius

• A quantitative description of canary vocalization is given.
• A seasonal canary repertoire is developed based on quantitative methods.
• Synthetic syllables are constructed for neural and behavioral studies on canaries.

This paper is devoted to a detailed quantitative analysis of the vocal repertoire of a domestic male canary (Serinus canarius) by means of multivariate statistical methods, and temporal and spectral feature extraction. In the first part of the paper a combination of such methods is employed to extract characteristic features, classify all syllables, and construct a complete seasonal syllable dictionary for the canary. In the second part, synthetic syllables corresponding to all entries in the dictionary are generated providing a standardized framework for behavioral and neural studies of canaries.