The Syllable Table
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The Syllable Table

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Syllable table is perhaps the most useful table the SAP2 generates (for example, see DVD maps). What makes the syllable table so useful is that it captures much of the dynamics of vocal changes at the syllabic level during an entire development or during an entire experiment and have it all in a single file. It allows you to cluster syllables to type, watch how syllable types 'move' in their feature space until model match is achieved, and it provides an extensive summary of different features of different syllables, namely summarizing their structure. In fact, you already created a syllable table in the previous chapter and exported it to Excel. Let's now repeat this exercise with a few variations: Open SAP2 Explore & Score. Under the 'data management' title click 'new table' and create the table 'syll1'. Open the sound 'example 1' and then select the 'Auto segment & save all syllables'. Outline the song as shown below:
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Note that the number of records in the table is now 4, and as you can see, this is not a particularly robust segmentation (see red arrow). We will discuss the issue of sound segmentation later on, for now just keep in mind that song segmentation is not a trivial task. Next open the sound 'example 2' and again outline it. You should now have 9 records in the syll1 table. Let's look at them in the MySQL Control Center. Because syllable tables contains several fields we capture the table in 3 snapshots:

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recnum is the global index (and the primary key) of the syllable table. SAP2 uses recnum to retrieve data epochs from the table, e.g., when displaying a DVD map. Also, the recnum tells you in what order the syllables were originally inserted into the table (and this order should match the order of serial number (the date & time 'age' stamp) of each syllable.

serial_number is the date & time stamp of each syllable, and it is identical to the age of the sound (wave) file that the syllable belongs to. As in the file name encoding, the integer number is the number of days elapsed since 1900. The fraction, however, is not the milliseconds elapsed since midnight but the fraction of the day elapsed (both numbers are given by the 'FileAge Windows function).
 
bird_ID is a number that identifies the bird. In Explore & Score it is zero by default, but in the Live mode, it corresponds to the bird's name.  In Batch mode, user is always used to provide a bird ID.

start_on is the time (in milliseconds) within the sound file where the syllable begin. It is an important feature that allows SAP2 (or you) to accurately identify the syllable in the raw data. For example, SAP2 can performe batch similarity measurements within and across syllable types, automatically retrieving sound files and outlining a specific syllable according to start_on and duration.

The features first and second order statistics fields are duration, mean features, minimum and maximum number of features, as well as the variance of features.

Date & time fields: albeit redundant, it is often convenient to have date and time (month, day of month, hour, etc) represented separately in fields, so as to allow simply querying of data subsets.

file_name is the name of the sound file that the syllable belongs to.
  

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