The sounds of human infancy—baby babbling, adult talking, lullaby singing, and more—fluctuate over time. Infant-friendly wearable audio recorders can now capture very large quantities of these sounds throughout infants’ everyday lives at home. Here, we review recent discoveries about how infants’ soundscapes are organized over the course of a day. Analyses designed to detect patterns in infants’ daylong audio at multiple timescales have revealed that everyday vocalizations are clustered hierarchically in time, that vocal explorations are consistent with foraging dynamics, and that some musical tunes occur for much longer cumulative durations than others. This approach focusing on the multiscale distributions of sounds heard and produced by infants is providing new, fundamental insights on human communication development from a complex-systems perspective.

人类婴儿期的声音——婴儿咿呀学语、成人说话、摇篮曲唱歌等等——随着时间的推移而波动。婴儿友好型可穿戴录音机现在可以在婴儿的日常生活中捕捉到大量此类声音。在这里，我们回顾了有关婴儿音景在一天中如何组织的最新发现。旨在在多个时间尺度上检测婴儿全天音频中的模式的分析表明，日常发声在时间上分层聚集，声音探索与觅食动态一致，并且某些音乐曲调的累积持续时间比其他曲调长得多。这种专注于婴儿听到和产生的声音的多尺度分布的方法正在提供新的、