On feature representations for marmoset vocal communication analysis

The acoustic analysis of marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) vocalisations is often used to understand the evolutionary origins of human language. Currently, the analysis is largely carried out in a manual or semi-manual manner. Thus, there is a need to develop automatic call analysis methods. In that direction, research has been limited to the development of analysis methods with small amounts of data or for specific scenarios. Furthermore, there is lack of prior knowledge about what type of information is relevant for different call analysis tasks. To address these issues, as a first step, this paper explores different feature representation methods, namely, HCTSA-based hand-crafted features Catch22, pre-trained self supervised learning (SSL) based features extracted from neural networks trained on human speech and end-to-end acoustic modelling for call-type classification, caller identification and caller sex identification. Through an investigation on three different marmoset call datasets, we demonstrate that SSL-based feature representations and end-to-end acoustic modelling tend to lead to better systems than Catch22 features for call-type and caller classification. Furthermore, we also highlight the impact of signal bandwidth on the obtained task performances.