The melody of crying

As the speech of a normal hearing and a deaf person are different, author expects differences between the crying sound of normal hearing and hard-of-hearing infants as well. In this study the author determined by computerized algorithms the melody of 2762 crying sounds from 316 infants, and compared the results between infants with hearing disorders and normal hearing. The analysis of the crying sounds is aimed to work out a new, cheaper hearing screening method, which would give a new potential to the early detection of hearing disorders. All the applied steps were developed by automatic, computer-executed methods providing reproducible, objective results in contradistinction to some previous studies, which had applied manual. methods and reached subjective results. Several possible ways for digital signal processing of the infant cry are discussed. A novel. melody shape classification system was created to obtain a more precise distribution of the melodies by their shapes. The system determined 77 different categories, where the first 20 categories covered the 95% of the melodies. The applied methods were created and tested in a huge number of melodies. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.