The human scream triggers a range of emotions. It’s one of the few primal responses we share with other animals. Few sounds rank as powerful as the first cry of a newborn. But the shrieks of that same infant will one day rattle the nerves of fellow airplane travelers...

Screams result from the bifurcation of regular phonation to a chaotic regime, thereby making screams particularly difficult to predict and ignore. While previous research in humans suggested that acoustic parameters such as “jitter” and “shimmer” are modulated in screams...