Summary
International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications
2008
Session Number:C4L-E
Session:
Number:C4L-E4
Inferring the intention of a Crying Baby -Characterization of Painful Cry by Pitch Variation-
Tomomasa Nagashima , Hidenori Tanaka,
pp.-
Publication Date:2008/9/7
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
Cry is the only way for baby to express his /her intention to the others. In contrast to adult, baby does not have ability to operate any language for communication. So, it is an interesting general question how mother knows the intention of her baby, when baby cries. Did baby cry due to hunger, unpleasantness in diapers or pain? In the acoustic study of voices, it has been developed along the two directions i.e., 1) recognizing the speech (contents) or speaker, and 2) how voices affect listeners impression. For the latter issue, we have previously investigated the relation between pitch variation of baby’s cry and listening impression by focusing the instability of fundamental period of baby’s cry. In this paper, we investigate the other problem of baby’s cry, i.e., emotion recognition of baby, which can be considered to be a part of speech recognition/speech understanding. Especially, we focus our attention to baby’s cry coming from pain. We analyzed the irregular variation of wave forms based on new index ePPQ and discussed the possibility to discriminate the painful cry from the cries with other causes. By comparing two cries coming from pain and other cause, it is suggested, based on ePPQ, that there is a possibility to discriminate baby’s cry resulting from pain from other cries. It will be important to discriminate the painful cry from the cries with other causes, like hunger, unpleasantness or fear, because the baby’s cry resulting from pain might be a signal indicating some unknown disease.