Abstract
The present study aimed to explore the connection between the acoustic parameters of dog sounds and the morphometric characteristics of the laryngeal cartilages in dogs with various body sizes. We compared the measurements of the laryngeal cartilages (n=15) of equal number of small, medium, and large size dog cadavers with the acoustic parameters recorded from other dogs of similar size and number. The morphometry was performed with a digital caliper. Animal sounds were analysed with Raven Pro 1.6 software. Waveform and spectrogram graphs were displayed for each sound with 512-point Hann window 50% overlap time. Sound selections were manually verified. Our findings confirmed that small-sized dogs generate the highest pitched barks in every measured frequency (5%-95% and peak). In addition, their vocal signals are of the lowest tonality expressed in sound-to-noise ratio (SNR). The Frequency parameters (F) 5%, 25%, and 95% showed significant correlations with the morphometric values of the laryngeal cartilages, which indicates their role in the sound formation. These acoustic parameters had strong to moderate negative correlations with the thyroid cartilage (TC) width and height; arytenoid cartilage (AC) – distance between proc. corniculatus and proc. cuneiformis (corn-cun), depth of ventricle and distance between the two proc. cuneiformis (cun-cun); width, height and depth of cricoid cartilage (CC); width and height of the epiglottis (EP). Our finding suggested that F5%, F25% and F95% can be reliable parameters and can be used in the classification methods of dogs’ sounds as it varies predictably with laryngeal cartilages size.