The acoustic space of pain: cries as indicators of distress recovering dynamics in pre-verbal infants

Koutseff, Alexis; Reby, David; Martin, Olivier; Levréro, Florence; Patural, Hugues; Mathevon, Nicolas

doi:10.1080/09524622.2017.1344931

Cited by 36 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…In humans, more tonal laughs have been reported to be less positive (Lavan et al 2016), although this is more likely to be related to the balance between voiced and unvoiced fragments than to nonlinear phenomena. As noted above, nonlinearities in vocalizations of human infants are associated with intense distress (Facchini et al 2005;Koutseff et al 2018), and rapid amplitude modulation in human screams is associated with greater perceived fear intensity (Arnal et al 2015). The literature is thus consistent with at least two possibilities: either nonlinearities amplify the intensity of any expressed emotion (i.e.…”

Section: The Role Of Nonlinear Phenomena In Communicationmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…In humans, the perceived intensity of pain or distress correlates with the presence of nonlinearities in the cries of infants (Facchini et al 2005;Koutseff et al 2018) and adult actors (Raine et al 2018), although it is not clear whether the effect is driven by high arousal, negative valence, or both. (2) High dominance.…”

Section: The Role Of Nonlinear Phenomena In Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although nonlinear vocal phenomena were traditionally regarded as being of peripheral importance to speech and associated with voice pathology (Robb and Saxman 1988;Fitch et al 2002), it is now established that nonlinearities are common in non-pathological voices. They are particularly well documented in infants (Robb and Saxman 1988;Mende et al 1990;Facchini et al 2005;Koutseff et al 2018), but adult voices appear to be no different (Raine et al 2018).…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nonlinear vocal phenomena, which can be roughly defined as various irregularities in the vibration of vocal folds (Riede et al 2005), are common in the vocal repertoire of many avian (Fee et al 1998) and mammalian species, including meerkats (Townsend and Manser 2011;Karp et al 2014), whales (Tyson et al 2007;Cazau et al 2016), manatees (Mann et al 2006), deer (Reby et al 2005(Reby et al , 2016, canids (Wilden et al 1998;Riede et al 2000;Schneider and Anderson 2011), chimpanzees (Riede et al 2007), and humans (Robb and Saxman 1988;Mende et al 1990;Bachorowski et al 2001;Facchini et al 2005;Koutseff et al 2018;Raine et al 2018). Major advances have recently been made in providing mathematical (Mende et al 1990;Herzel et al 1995;Mergell and Herzel 1997;Tokuda et al 2002;Herbst et al 2013), physiological (Wilden et al 1998;Titze 2008), and acoustic (Riede et al 2000(Riede et al , 2005Fitch et al 2002) descriptions of these complex sounds, but their evolutionary significance and communicative roles are still debated (Fitch et al 2002;Riede et al 2007;Karp et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The perceptual effects of manipulating nonlinear phenomena in synthetic nonverbal vocalizations

Anikin

2019

Bioacoustics

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The communicative role of nonlinear vocal phenomena remains poorly understood since they are difficult to manipulate or even measure with conventional tools. In this study parametric voice synthesis was employed to add pitch jumps, subharmonics/sidebands, and chaos to synthetic human nonverbal vocalizations. In Experiment 1 (86 participants, 144 sounds), chaos was associated with lower valence, and subharmonics with higher dominance. Arousal ratings were not noticeably affected by any nonlinear effects, except for a marginal effect of subharmonics. These findings were extended in Experiment 2 (83 participants, 212 sounds) using ratings on discrete emotions. Listeners associated pitch jumps, subharmonics, and especially chaos with aversive states such as fear and pain. The effects of manipulations in both experiments were particularly strong for ambiguous vocalizations, such as moans and gasps, and could not be explained by a non-specific measure of spectral noise (harmonics-to-noise ratio)that is, they would be missed by a conventional acoustic analysis. In conclusion, listeners interpret nonlinear vocal phenomena quite flexibly, depending on their type and the kind of vocalization in which they occur. These results showcase the utility of parametric voice synthesis and highlight the need for a more fine-grained analysis of voice quality in acoustic research.

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Section: The Role Of Nonlinear Phenomena In Communicationmentioning

confidence: 67%

Section: The Role Of Nonlinear Phenomena In Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The perceptual effects of manipulating nonlinear phenomena in synthetic nonverbal vocalizations

Anikin

2019

Bioacoustics

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“…While some researchers have argued that jitter and shimmer are inconsequential in the perception of non-pathological modal speech [53], these perturbation parameters appear to play a significant role in characterizing emotional nonverbal vocalizations. Indeed, acoustic analysis procedures similar to these have been applied successfully in previous studies of human babies’ cries [54,55].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human roars communicate upper-body strength more effectively than do screams or aggressive and distressed speech

et al. 2019

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Despite widespread evidence that nonverbal components of human speech (e.g., voice pitch) communicate information about physical attributes of vocalizers and that listeners can judge traits such as strength and body size from speech, few studies have examined the communicative functions of human nonverbal vocalizations (such as roars, screams, grunts and laughs). Critically, no previous study has yet to examine the acoustic correlates of strength in nonverbal vocalisations, including roars, nor identified reliable vocal cues to strength in human speech. In addition to being less acoustically constrained than articulated speech, agonistic nonverbal vocalizations function primarily to express motivation and emotion, such as threat, and may therefore communicate strength and body size more effectively than speech. Here, we investigated acoustic cues to strength and size in roars compared to screams and speech sentences produced in both aggressive and distress contexts. Using playback experiments, we then tested whether listeners can reliably infer a vocalizer’s actual strength and height from roars, screams, and valenced speech equivalents, and which acoustic features predicted listeners’ judgments. While there were no consistent acoustic cues to strength in any vocal stimuli, listeners accurately judged inter-individual differences in strength, and did so most effectively from aggressive voice stimuli (roars and aggressive speech). In addition, listeners more accurately judged strength from roars than from aggressive speech. In contrast, listeners’ judgments of height were most accurate for speech stimuli. These results support the prediction that vocalizers maximize impressions of physical strength in aggressive compared to distress contexts, and that inter-individual variation in strength may only be honestly communicated in vocalizations that function to communicate threat, particularly roars. Thus, in continuity with nonhuman mammals, the acoustic structure of human aggressive roars may have been selected to communicate, and to some extent exaggerate, functional cues to physical formidability.

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Context-related variation in the peripartum vocalisations and phonatory behaviours of Holstein-Friesian dairy cows

Green

Clark

Lomax

et al. 2020

Applied Animal Behaviour Science

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The acoustic space of pain: cries as indicators of distress recovering dynamics in pre-verbal infants

Abstract: International audienc

Cited by 36 publications

References 38 publications

The perceptual effects of manipulating nonlinear phenomena in synthetic nonverbal vocalizations

The perceptual effects of manipulating nonlinear phenomena in synthetic nonverbal vocalizations

Human roars communicate upper-body strength more effectively than do screams or aggressive and distressed speech

Context-related variation in the peripartum vocalisations and phonatory behaviours of Holstein-Friesian dairy cows

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