Fundamental frequency evaluation of infant crying

Infant crying provides importance information about the baby's physical and physiological conditions, such as health, gender and emotions. The anatomy of infant's glottal causes different fundamental frequency (F0) production in its cry sound. It is generally accepted that the assumption of an adult voice has quasi-stationary in short period (about 100 ms). However, infant cry has much shorter stationary period (about 5 ms), therefore it is necessary to evaluate several F0 extraction techniques, namely MB-formant tracking, STRAIGHT, YAAPT, and YIN. The results showed that STRAIGHT and YAAPT were successfully extracted F0 of infant crying with accurate voiced and unvoiced regions. The results also showed that span of the F0 was within the range from 190Hz to 600Hz. This suggests that the infant F0 is higher than those of adult. We also evaluated formant of infant cry and the Wavsurfer was more accurate than that of Mustafa-Bruce Formant Tracker.