The Development of the Melody of the Infant Cry to Detect Disorders during Infancy

In this study the first communication signal of life (i.e. the infant cry) will be analyzed. Authors show methods for the acoustic analysis of the infant cry and ways how to obtain the melody of crying. Previously several research groups had reported about the development of the infant cry, now authors are to present the development of the melody. The results are based on an infant cry database containing 2640 crying samples. If we know what kind of developmental chain we can expect from a healthy infant, we could check if an unhealthy infant followed this development or not. This study mostly deals with the classification of melody shapes, and the development of the fundamental frequency and the duration of the melodies.