Study of acoustic features of newborn cries that correlate with the context

Many researches related to the infant cry analysis intent to estimate the context and/or obtain objective information concerning the physical and emotional condition of newborns. Using several techniques in signal processing, peculiar acoustics features, such as the fundamental frequency and formants, are classically analyzed. However, the findings reveal the existence of some contests with respect to the conclusions. In this article a specific phonologic program was used to analyze the cry signal, aiming to investigate the real significance of some classical frequency domain parameters. The results point out that just two among four studied parameters seem to contribute in the analysis of the cry signal context. Beside the significance of the two parameters in such analysis, the problem complexity indicate that the more researches are necessary to find out new parameters, maybe correlated with psychoacoustic principles.