Acoustic correlates of individuality in the cries of human infants

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Abstract
The acoustic features that differentiate the cries of individual human infants were examined in this study. A recognition task, performed by 400 nonparent adults, was used to classify twenty 30‐day‐old infants as easy or difficult to recognize on the sole basis of their tape recorded cries. The cries of easy‐ vs difficult‐to‐recognize infants were then compared on measures of duration, fundamental frequency, peak frequency in the spectrum, signal‐to‐noise ratios, and energy in selected frequency bands. The results indicated that each of these measures differentiated the cries of easy‐ vs difficult‐to‐recognize infants. Such redundancy should make the cry robust to degradations of selected acoustic parameters, thus enhancing its ability to carry information about individual identity across distances.