What’s in a scream? The sounds people identify as screams share certain sound qualities—a kind of acoustic DNA that tells a listener’s ear what they’re hearing is a scream, even if it isn’t. “Screams likely originally functioned to startle attacking predators. Research on screams has the potential to help us understand the evolution of emotional communication,” says Jay Schwartz at Emory University.
Jay Schwartz and his colleagues asked 181 volunteers to listen to 75 sounds that included laughter, crying, moans, groans, and yells from acted sources, like television or movies, and more natural sources, such as a YouTube video of a child opening a present and screaming in delight. The listeners indicated whether or not each sound was something they considered a scream. “We did not provide any type of definition for a scream because we were trying to get at what is it in people’s minds that distinguishes a scream,” says Schwartz, who presented his work at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America on 14 May.
When they analyzed the sound files, they found that the ones listed as screams had acoustic similarities. People were more likely to consider a sound a scream if it was higher in pitch, and had a varied change in pitch, first moving up and then down at the end.
Rapid changes in amplitude—perceived as a rough, gravelly quality—also tended to be classified as screams more than sounds with a smoother tone. This sound was classified as a scream by 64 percent of the listeners. Surprisingly, a recording of a whistle was categorized as a scream by 70 percent of the participants. “It was because the whistle exhibited a lot of the acoustic qualities that we found to be associated with a scream, including high pitch and roughness,” says Schwartz.
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