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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Oct 1.
Published in final edited form as: Emotion. 2011 Oct;11(5):1124–1133. doi: 10.1037/a0024173

Table 3.

Definitions of Acoustic Measures

Duration Time from beginning to end of each expiratory segment (in msec).
Fundamental Frequency (F0) Mean and SD of the extracted pitch trace for the entire vocalization frequency using an autocorrelation estimation method. Pitch extraction range set at 200-700 Hz.
Energy Sum of the squared amplitudes of the time sampled vocalization
Harmonicity The degree of acoustic periodicity, expressed in dB.
Peak Frequency The frequency in the Long Term Average Spectrum with the greatest amplitude (in Hz)
Spectral Energy The energy in selected frequency bands from the overall spectrum of the vocalizations. Expressed as a proportion of the total energy. Bands: 100-500 Hz, 500-1000 Hz, 1000-1500 Hz, 1500-2000 Hz, and 2000-2500 Hz.

Note. Further description of these measures is available from the authors or from the manual available at www.praat.org.