We extend and generalize the Teager-Kaiser [in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (1993), Vol. 3, p. 149] and the higher-order differential energy operators [IEEE Signal Process. Lett.2, 152 (1995)] to a large class of operators called higher-order energy operators. We show that for AM-FM signal demodulation, the introduced partial derivative orders have to satisfy certain conditions. These operators are parameterized for local processing of AM-FM signals. The operators are illustrated using synthetic signals and a real signal from light scanning interferometry.