Is it a sign of hunger, pain, or discomfort? A baby's cries could mean a lot of things and are essential to an infant's well-being, but exactly what a cry means has long been a mystery to most.
But now researchers from Brown University and Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island say they've developed a new way to analyze an infant's cries - and explain them.
In announcing the new technology, the scientific team said it hopes its new cry analysis device provides a new opportunity to identify children with neurological problems or developmental disorders.
Of particular note, the researchers believe the new analysis method could help detect autism in infants.
"There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics," Stephen Sheinkopf, said assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown, was the Daily Mail reported. "For instance, babies with birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in pregnancy or birth, or babies who are extremely premature, can have on-going medical effects...cry analysis can be a non-invasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies."
The system operates in two steps. First, the device separates recorded cries into 12.5-millisecond frames, with each frame then analyzed within several characteristic parameters, including frequency, voicing and acoustic volume.
In the second phase, the newly-examined data is used to develop a more comprehensive perspective of the cry and pare down the analysis parameters to those that seem to most fit the particular situation.
Ultimately, the analyzer evaluates cries within 80 different parameters, each of which could provide important queues about a baby's condition.
"The idea is that cry can be a window into the brain," said Barry Lester, director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk, the Daily Mail reported.
If neurological abnormalities affect the way babies are able to control their vocal chords, the research team reasoned, such differences might manifest in disparities in pitch and other acoustic features.
That suspected relationship between neurological conditions and vocalizations is key for Sheinkopf, a specialist in developmental disorders who plans to use the tool to look for cry features that may correlate with autism.
"We've known for a long time that older individuals with autism produce sounds or vocalizations that are unusual or atypical," Sheinkopf said. "How do you find signs of autism in infancy? That's been a major challenge."