Scientists at the University of Washington have released an interesting tool for studying the ultrasonic vocalizations of rats. It is a convolutional neural network capable of analyzing and categorizing rat calls.
Studying rat vocalizations is time-consuming for a human. For one thing, most squeaks that rats make are above the 20kHz threshold of human hearing. So analysis requires slowing recordings down by as much as a factor of 20 to hear the highest vocalizations. This also means that one hour of audio becomes 20+ hours of analysis.
