The Birth of Voice: Acoustic Baselines of Newborn Vocalizations in the First Minutes of Extrauterine Life.

Authors

Marlene Holzer, Katrin D Bartl-Pokorny, Claudia Zitta, Johanna Schuller, Björn W Schuller, Bernhard Schwaberger, Herbert Fluhr, Gerhard Pichler, Florian B Pokorny

Published in

Journal of voice : official journal of the Voice Foundation. Oct 28, 2026. Epub Oct 28, 2026.

Abstract

Newborn crying immediately after birth has traditionally been regarded as a key sign of vitality, reflecting basic cardiovascular and respiratory function. However, initial postnatal vocal behavior not only limited to crying and its underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood, and systematic acoustic analyses of birth vocalizations (BiVo) are lacking. This study addresses this gap by providing indicative values for established vocalization parameters to comprehensively characterize the very first vocalizations of newborns in a largely homogeneous non-pathological sample.
We analyzed publicly available birth videos of 60 vaginally delivered newborns (35 female, 25 male), who exhibited an unremarkable health status.
In each video, we manually segmented BiVo during the first 3 minutes after birth, yielding a total of 7681 vocalizations. Each segment was subsequently assigned to one of three predefined vocalization types. On a per-newborn basis, we extracted the number of vocalizations and the time from birth to the respective first vocalization. On a per-vocalization basis, we calculated duration and five standard acoustic parameters, namely mean loudness, harmonics-to-noise ratio, fundamental frequency, jitter, and shimmer. In addition to descriptive analysis, we applied linear mixed-effects models to examine potential sex differences. All analyses were performed both across all vocalizations and separately by vocalization type.
We established indicative values, such as a mean number of 128 vocalizations, a mean time of 12 seconds between the time of birth and the first vocalization, a mean vocalization duration of 0.53 seconds, and a mean fundamental frequency of crying vocalizations of 439 Hz. Additionally, we observed sex differences, particularly in the number of vocalizations and the fundamental frequency of crying vocalizations.
This work reveals the first comprehensive BiVo characterization and, thereby, represents a fundamental step towards understanding newborn vocal behavior immediately after birth, which is essential for any future attempts to exploit BiVo as a health indicator.

PMID:
42951734
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 29 Oct 2026.

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