Maturity of Baby Sounds

Welcome fellow citizen scientists!

We need your help to classify some very short audio clips, that have been taken from very long recordings. We are trying to find out more about the sounds children, and people around them, make.

To study this, we had children aged between 3 months and 5 years wear a recorder for many hours. We then extracted some clips using a simple algorithm: If there is pure silence, ignore; if there is some sound, extract. This simple algorithm still pulls out some noise or silence -- so don't worry if most of the clips you hear are just that. What we are really interested in, though, are vocal sounds made by the child or other people around them. We want to know who made the sounds, and what the sounds were like.

We ask you to label these very short clips based on who was making the sound (female/male/undecided baby/child/adolescent/adult) and what “type” of sound it was. The sounds include crying, laughing, and two types of speech-like vocalizations. This is so that we can see how children’ sounds change as they get older. You can listen to each clip as many times as you would like before making a decision.

For those who are returning, this builds on our previous workflow by allowing us to not only learn about the sounds that babies make, but also the sounds they hear. Through this new approach, your responses will allow us to describe how babies' speech development relates to the speech they hear, and compare different recording devices and even train machine learning algorithms.

So a big thank you for your help!!!