Song Torrent fly recording device

As part of a complex courtship behavior, male flies vibrate their wings to produce a distinctive song that conveys a message to nearby females. Using internal information and cues from females and the environment, males decide moment to moment whether to sing and how.
Although scientists now know a lot about how fly movements produce songs, it was still not clear which cells and circuits in the fly’s nervous system enable the behavior.
Now, using a suite of novel tools, including a custom-built fly recording studio, Janelia researchers have pinpointed the group of neurons in the nerve cord - a structure analogous to our spinal cord - that produce and pattern the fly’s two major courtship songs.
The team used a custom-built fly recording studio, Song Torrent, to simultaneously record the songs generated by 96 flies. As they activated or silenced each cell type while the flies sang, the researchers could tease out the role of different neurons in generating the signal. They analyzed more than 1,800 hours of song from more than 5,000 male flies to quantify how changes in neuronal activity affected different characteristics of the two songs.
Song Torrent simultaneously records audio and video of 96 single fruit flies or pairs of fruit flies. The first video shows an example output from the software, illustrating 96 pairs of courting flies from a single recording session.
The second video shows video and audio recorded on Song Torrent during optogenetic stimulation of a fly expressing the red-shifted channel rhodopsin CsChrimson in the descending interneuron plP10 that drives courtship song.
Credit: Sawtelle et al. DOI: 10.1101/2024.01.09.574712