Original Scientific Article
Relationship between acoustic characteristics of dogs’ sounds and morphometric measurements of the laryngeal cartilages in dogs with various body sizes
Pavlina Ivanova Hristova * ,
Iliana Stefanova Ruzhanova-Gospodinova ,
Mihail Stoyanov Chervenkov

Mac Vet Rev 2026; 49 (1): i - viii

10.2478/macvetrev-2025-0032

Received: 10 December 2024

Received in revised form: 10 June 2025

Accepted: 07 August 2025

Available Online First: 19 December 2025

Published on: 15 March 2026

Correspondence: Pavlina Ivanova Hristova, pspiridonova@ltu.bg
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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.

Keywords: vocalizations, dog, laryngeal cartilages, morphometry, bioacoustics

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Copyright

©2025 Hristova P.I. This is an open-access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declared that they have no potential conflict of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Citation Information

Macedonian Veterinary Review. Volume 49, Issue 1, Pages i-viii, e-ISSN 1857-7415, p-ISSN 1409-7621, DOI:  https://doi.org/10.2478/macvetrev-2025-0032

The all content of the Macedonian Veterinary Review, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.