Gadget Inspector: Sob Story
The WhyCry digitally analyzes babies' wails.
by Sam Apple
January 9, 2007
Babies have a lot going for them. Their big eyes and fat cheeks are cute. Their skin is soft. When not sitting in their own excrement, they smell quite nice. The problem with babies is that they're not great communicators. If babies could talk, being a parent would be easy. Probably babies would be repetitive. Probably they would say, "I would like to suck on a breast now" over and over; or, "I am tired and should get some sleep, but first I would like to suck on a breast for a bit." Listening to babies would be boring as anything, but it would still be preferable to babies' chosen form of communication: going completely apeshit.
The good news for babies is that no one is taking their communication difficulties lightly. An increasing number of parents are enrolling their pre-verbal babies in sign language classes. Australian mom Priscilla Dunstan recently announced on Oprah that she had discovered "the secret language of babies." ("Eair," in case you were wondering, means "I have lower gas.") For parents particularly interested in what their babies have to say about their bowel movements, there is also EC, or emissions communications, a method of studying a baby's face to anticipate bodily functions. 
My wife was not amused when, ten seconds after she began to feed him, I looked at the WhyCry and blurted out "He's hungry!"
But the most creative solution to the baby communication problem comes from Spanish electronics engineer Pedro Monagas. Like most parents, he was frustrated by his newborn's incessant crying. Unlike most parents, Monagas didn't throw up his arms. Instead, he tape-recorded his son Alex's cries and listened to the tapes again and again. It was a chore most parents would consider about as fun as eating barbed wire, but Monagas's masochism was only beginning. By digitally analyzing Alex's cries, he began to detect patterns. Cries for hunger were rhythmic and tended to increase in intensity. Cries of discomfort were drawn-out whines followed by a short pause, and so on.
To confirm his suspicion that a baby's cries are distinct and expressive, Monagas spent the next three years analyzing the tantrums of more than 100 other Spanish infants. His testing revealed the same crying patterns again and again. All babies, it turned out, were alike in their unhappiness.
The result of Monagas’s research is perhaps the most bizarre and
intriguing baby invention of all time: a handheld electronic device,
dubbed the WhyCry, that uses digital signal processing to measure the
pitch, volume, and frequency of an infant’s cry and then, after a 20
second pause, translates the cry as either “hungry,” “sleepy,” “bored,”
“annoyed,” or “stressed.”
I tested the WhyCry on my son Isaac when he was four months old, and I found I enjoyed carrying the device around. Using the WhyCry gave me that brief "I'm more important than people realize because I'm in possession of a special gadget" thrill that all men know. Granted, there were some less fun moments. My wife, Jennifer, was not especially amused to find me standing over a screaming Isaac with WhyCry in-hand when I should have been comforting him, and she was even less amused when, ten seconds after she began to feed him, I looked at the WhyCry and blurted out "He's hungry!" as though I had just solved a great mystery.
©2006 Sam Apple and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Sam Apple's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first
book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was named a finalist for the PEN America award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005 he received the
annual Faux Faulkner award. Apple's new book, American Parent, is on sale now. |
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