Melody Shape - A Suggested Novel Attribute for the Biomedical Analysis of the Infant Cry

The biomedical analysis of the infant cry is aimed to find connections between several diseases during infancy and their influence on the human sound production system. A new, non-invasive diagnostic tool could be created, if these connections were fully discovered. Various reports have already dealt with the analysis of the crying sound for physiological, psychic, physical, developmental, etc. reasons. In these studies characteristic attributes of the infant cry were obtained and analyzed. In the time domain mostly absolute and normalized durations, in the frequency domain frequency components, intervals were determined. The melody of crying was analyzed occasionally as there were no exact methods for categorizing the shapes of the melodies. In this paper the authors introduce a new system for categorizing the melodies. By this system the analysis of the melodies can be evaluated in an easy and objective way that it could be included in further biomedical researches dealing with the infant cry.