How this works

What you’re doing

Each recording is a baby from the founder collection. Listen to the whole thing, then mark each early sound you can hear clearly and say which one it is. We want your ears, not a guess: “Not sure” is always fine.

Marking a sound

  1. Drag across the waveform over the sound. Or play the recording and press Start here and End here (keys [ and ]).
  2. Press Loop to hear just that part again and again. Zoom in helps on long recordings.
  3. Choose what it is. It’s added to the list below the player.
  4. Fine-tune the edges with Adjust (or select it and drag again). When the loop starts and ends in the right place, tick Start and end checked.

Mark from the first moment you can hear the sound to its end. Don’t mark speech, handling noise, or only the loudest part.

The choices

Under Adjust you can also note what you’d call the sound when you hear only the loop, without the rest of the recording. That’s optional.

You don’t need to say why the baby is crying. This isn’t a diagnosis.

Full crying

If the baby moves into sustained full crying, choose Yes and set the moment it starts. Early sounds you mark should end before then. If you can’t tell, choose Can’t tell.

Saving and submitting

Everything saves automatically a moment after you change it. The status by the title says if something couldn’t be saved and why. Submitting locks your answer so it stays independent, and then shows the label the recording was originally filed under. You can still add a note afterwards.

Sets

There are 209 recordings in sets of about 20. Please start with the pilot set. The remaining sets are open whenever you’d like to carry on, and you don’t have to finish in one sitting. Another 60 recordings are held back for testing and aren’t shown here.

Keys

Space play or pause · [ start · ] end · L loop · ← → move 1 second (Shift for 0.1 s). Keys don’t fire while you’re typing.

Headphones help. Other listeners can’t see your answers.