The acoustic characteristics of infant cries

Abstract

The present study measured the acoustic characteristics of infant cries. Twenty-eight infants participated, ranging from 2 to 23 months of age. Crying was elicited when their mother moved to a distance, leaving them in the lap of unknown person. The cries were recorded with a microphone placed 1 m from the infant’s mouth in an anechoic room. Analysis of the recorded cries revealed four patterns: cries were classified as either voiced or breathy, and as higher or lower than 7 kHz. Certain cry characteristics were later rated as more stress-causing, suggesting they could potentially elicit more abuse reactions. The recorded cries were presented to adults and breathy cries with a high-frequency component were labeled as emergency cries and as likely to cause high stress levels in parents and caregivers. In Japan, living spaces have recently begun changing such that environments are more echoic, perhaps exacerbating negative reactions to high-frequency components of infant cries.

“Cry Baby”: Using Spectrographic Analysis to Assess Neonatal Health Status from an Infant’s Cry

“…In addition, use of the dynamic time warping (DTW) based approach is presented to investigate the class seperability of different cry modes through the nature of the optimal warping path in DTW algorithm. Other significant studies in infant cry analysis literature are reported in [2,4,7,[9][10][11][12]14,16,18,20,28,32,38,40,43,50,53,55,56]. …”