A Database of Infant Cry Sounds to Study the Likely Cause of Cry

Infant cry is a mode of communication, for interacting and drawing attention. The infants cry due to physiological, emotional or some ailment reasons. Cry involves high pitch changes in the signal. In this paper we describe an ‘Infant Cry Sounds Database’ (ICSD), collected especially for the study of likely cause of an infant’s cry. The database consists of infant cry sounds due to six causes: pain, discomfort, emotional need, ailment, environmental factors and hunger/thirst. The ground truth cause of cry is established with the help of two medical experts and parents of the infants. Preliminary analysis is carried out using the sound production features, the instantaneous fundamental frequency and frame energy derived from the cry acoustic signal, using auto correlation and linear prediction (LP) analysis. Spectrograms give the base reference. The infant cry sounds due to pain and discomfort are distinguished. The database should be helpful towards automated diagnosis of the causes of infant cry.