Add BEP47: support for audio/video recordings in behavioral experiments

[bendichter]

pull_request: bids-standard/bids-specification#2231
html_preview: https://bids-specification--2231.org.readthedocs.build/en/2231/modality-specific-files/behavioral-experiments.html

@bids-standard/maintainers

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📚 Documentation preview 📚: https://bids-website--759.org.readthedocs.build/en/759/

[neuromechanist]

Discussed in maintainers meeting on 12/18/25, pending @bids-standard/steering discussion.

[yarikoptic]

Discussed in maintainers meeting on 12/18/25, pending @bids-standard/steering discussion.

@neuromechanist isn't if number is already assigned (wasn't it), we are good to go here as to merge? at least according to the WiP BEP process spreadsheet . OR in other words -- what happens if steering group says no -- do we put number back in the pool of integers? ;-)

[bendichter]

When does the @bids-standard/steering meet?

[neuromechanist]

First steering meeting of the year is Jan 15th.
@yarikoptic, Yes we can merge after/if steering approves. If they don't, the PR is closed, so there will be no BEP047 to start with ;)

[yarikoptic]

and it will be the first steering meeting in years without me... I should crash maintainer meetings I think...

[dorahermes]

Sorry, this was a bit of a short timescale to review, so this will be discussed in the next BIDS Steering Committee meeting on February 5th.

[bendichter]

So we can't even assign this a BEP # yet? Who would be the best person to contact about this?

[neuromechanist]

@bendichter, your request for a BEP number has been on the maintainers and steering review process from Dec 15 (one month). Maintainers already discussed and recommended to steering to assign a BEP number. Please note that a couple of meetings were not held due to holidays.

BEP process guide recommends contacting maintainers and steering as soon as you determined a BEP is needed and before major development. Unfortunately, in this case, this request has been made at a much advanced stage of the PR, we will try to accommodate that.

@dorahermes is one of the Steering Committee members. The steering committee will decide on this during their next session. I will follow up with them as well to provide context and answer questions if needed.

[neuromechanist]

Here is a small summary of why we need the proposed BEP047, as requested by @cmaumet and @bids-standard/steering:

If you need a quick read on PR 2231 (potential candiate for BEP047):

BIDS currently lacks a standardized way to store audio, video, and image recordings captured from behaving subjects. This gap is increasingly problematic as modern neuroscience relies heavily on such data: speech and vocalization studies, animal behavior paradigms (open field, touchscreen tasks), pose estimation pipelines like DeepLabCut, dyadic interaction research, and clinical behavioral assessments all produce audio/video as primary data. Without a standard, these files are stored ad-hoc outside BIDS or in lab-specific conventions, fragmenting reproducibility. Independent efforts like the Bridge2AI Voice consortium have already built BIDS-inspired schemas to fill this void, confirming the unmet demand.

The potential BEP047 (PR #2231) proposes placing behavioral recordings under sub-/beh/ with _audio, _video, _audiovideo, and _image suffixes, along with structured sidecar metadata for technical properties (frame rate, resolution, sample rate, device). The proposal was deliberately designed in coordination with BEP044 (Stim-BIDS, PR #2022), which standardizes stimulus files presented to subjects in a root-level /stimuli directory. The two BEPs share the same four suffix names but are cleanly distinguished by directory context and entity structure: stimuli use stim-, while behavioral recordings use standard subject/session entities. This alignment was explicitly discussed in the community (issue #1771) and avoids naming conflicts while maintaining conceptual clarity between "what was shown to the subject" and "what the subject did."

[neuromechanist]

@bids-standard/steering approved at the 02/05/2026 meeting.