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.