Quantification of similarity between dickcissel song dialects

Abstract: In this thesis, five methods of scoring the similarity of phrases from dickcissel birds are explored. The methods are tested on real and simulated data. The method that is found to perform the best is a variation of the spectrographic cross-correlation method that also looks at correlation in the frequency domain. The second best method is based on singular value decomposition of the spectrogram of the phrase and extracting density-based features. While the methods are not good enough to give a reliable similarity between two phrases, they are able to find structure in a larger data set.