• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.113-120
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• 2010

In this paper, we investigate the acoustic characteristics of sustained voices from normal subjects and patients with laryngeal pathologies. Perturbation methods (including jitter and shimmer), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and nonlinear dynamic methods (such as correlation dimension) are used to analyze normal and pathological voices. We find that jitter does not statistically discriminate between normal and pathological voices, but a significant difference is found for shimmer, SNR, and correlation dimension. The results suggest that nonlinear dynamic analysis may be valuable for the analysis of normal and pathological voices but perturbation analysis should be applied with caution for pathological voice analysis.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.73-80
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• 2020

In this study, a method for measuring the jitter component in continuous speech is presented. In the conventional jitter measurement method, pitch variabilities are commonly measured from the sustained vowels. In the case of continuous speech, such as a spoken sentence, distortion occurs with the existing measurement method owing to the influence of prosody information according to the sentence. Therefore, we propose a method to reduce the pitch fluctuations of prosody information in continuous speech. To remove this pitch fluctuation component, a curve representing the fluctuation is obtained via polynomial interpolation for the pitch track in the analysis interval, and the shift is removed according to the curve. Subsequently, the variability of the pitch frequency is obtained by a method of measuring jitter from the trajectory of the pitch from which the shift is removed. To measure the effects of the proposed method, parameter values before and after the operations are compared using samples from the Kay Pentax MEEI database. The statistical analysis of the experimental results showed that jitter components from the continuous speech can be measured effectively by proposed method and the values are comparable to the parameters of sustained vowel from the same speaker.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.251-260
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• 2007

The structure changes of the vocal folds are related to the fundamental frequencies (F0). In other words, the increasing in vocal fold length and thickness makes the result of dropping in the F0 during the mutational period. The purpose of this study was to investigate F0 of normal children's voice in mutational period. 360 children (180 boys and 180 girls) were participated in this experiment. The age was ranged from 11 to 16 years. The subjects were asked to produce sustained comer vowels (/a/ /i/ /u/) five times each and the data were analyzed using the MDVP of CSL. The result shows that the F0 are considerably decreased with age and reach to adults' F0 by 16 years in most cases. In particular, the F0 of male subjects were rapidly decreased between the ages from 12 ($226.98\;{\pm}\;19\;Hz$) to 13 years ($169.3\;{\pm}\;25\;Hz$), while the F0 of female subjects were slowly changed from the later period of 12 to 16 years old. This result may be used by the meaning of guideline and lead the basic data to differentiate between normal voice and voice disorder.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.27-38
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• 2002

The purpose of this article is to present the acoustic parameters (VOT, jitter, shimmer, vF0, vAm, NHR, SPI, VTI, DVB, DSH) for consonants (/pipi/, /$p^{h}ip^{h}i$/, /p'ip'i/) and sustained vowels (/a/, /e/, /i/) produced by normal subjects and dysphonia patients at two vocal effort(normal, high) by Lombard effect using 60dB white noise. Lombard effect indicates the vocal effort increase in noisy situation. At normal vocal effort, in general the acoustic parameter values of patients are greater than normal. And in noisy situation, significant decrease of acoustic values is seen in normal compared with in dysphonia patients. The clinical implication of this finding, the vocal quality in dysphonia is not compensated by vocal effort as well as normal subjects because of the inefficiency caused by abnormal vocal fold appearance and function. And with this result, we can counsel that the voice quality can not be improved as well as the patient expect.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.99-108
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• 2011

The perturbation parameters like jitter, shimmer, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are largely estimated in the particular segment from the subjective or whole portion of the given pathological voice signal although there are many possible regions to be able to analyze the voice signals. In this paper, the pathological voice signals were classified as type 1, 2, 3, or 4 according to narrow band spectrogram and the value differences of the perturbation parameters extracted in the subjective and entire portion tended to be getting bigger as from type 1 to type 4 signals. Therefore, sample selection method based on moving window to analyze type 2 and 3 signals as well as type 1 signals is proposed. Although type 3 signals cannot be analyzed using the perturbation analysis, the type 3 signals by selecting out the samples in which error count is less than 10 through moving window were analyzed. At present, there is no method to be able to analyze the type 4 signals. Future research will endeavor to determine the best way to evaluate such voices.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.155-163
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• 2009

This paper introduces an automatic voice classification system for the diagnosis of individual constitution based on Sasang Constitutional Medicine (SCM) in Traditional Korean Medicine (TKM). For the developing of this algorithm, we used the voices of 473 speakers and extracted a total of 144 speech features from the speech data consisting of five sustained vowels and one sentence. The classification system, based on a rule-based algorithm that is derived from a non parametric statistical method, presents binary negative decisions. In conclusion, 55.7% of the speech data were diagnosed by this system, of which 72.8% were correct negative decisions.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.141-144
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to identify the acoustic changes according to age and to provide the evaluation criteria of elderly voice. The number of 120 Korean adults (three age groups * two sex groups) proceeded sustained three vowels, read apart of 'Taking a walk' and explained a picture. The data was analyzed acoustically with MDVP of CSL. The results showed that: 1)there was statistically most significant changes in sex and age in F0 than the others but no significant in Shimmer. 2)acoustic parameters were changed from young adulthood to old age. Different patterns of change with aging were observed in men and women.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.119-123
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• 1999

Background and Objectives : Conditions such as muscle atrophy, stretching of strap muscles, and continued craniofacial growth factors have been cited as contributing to the changes observed in the vocal tract structure and function in elderly speakers. The purpose of the present study is to compare F$_1$ and F$_2$ frequency levels in elderly and young adult male and female speakers producing a series of vowels ranging from high-front to low-back placement. Material and Methods : The subjects were two groups of young adults(10 males, 10 females, mean age 21 years old range 19-24 years) and two groups of elderly speakers(10 males, 10 females, mean age 67 years : range 60-84 years). Each subject participated in speech pathologist to be a speaker of unimpared standard Korean. The headphone was positioned 2 cm from the speakers lips. Each speaker sustained the five vowels for 5 s. Formant frequency measures were obtained from an analysis of linear predictive coding in CSL model 4300B(Kay co). Results : Repeated measure AVOVA procedures were completed on the $F_1$ and $F_2$ data for the male and female speakers. $F_2$ formant frequency levels were proven to be significantly lower fir elderly speakers. Conclusions : We presume $F_2$ vocal cavity(from the point of tongue constriction to lip) lengthening in elderly speakers. The research designed to observe dynamic speech production more directly will be needed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.109-115
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• 2011

The purposes of this study were to identify acoustic parameters of connected speech and to contribute to acoustic analysis of dysphonic voice about patient's natural speech voice as well as sustained phonation of vowels. Acoustic parameters of sentences included LTAS (long-term average spectrum) mean and spectral slope over frequence ranges such as 0-4kHz, 0-6kHz, 0-8kHz, 0-12.5kHz as well as HNR. Acoustic parameters of the vowel 'a' included jitter, RAP, shimmer, NHR, and HNR. Based on 'G' of GRBAS for the severity of dysphonia, two experienced raters judged and classified as four groups including controls, mild, moderate and severe dysphonic group. Connected speech was two sentences extracted from 'stroll' passage. Parameters of the vowel and LTAS mean of the sentences were measured by CSL. The spectral slope of the sentences and HNR of the vowel and the sentences were measured by Praat. Data were statistically analyzed by Spearman correlation and Kruskal-Wallis test using SPSS 12.0. The results of this study are as follows: First, jitter, RAP, shimmer and NHR were significantly different between the groups. Second, for several frequencies, LTAS mean and spectral slope of the sentences were significantly different between the groups. Third, the HNR of the sentences were significantly different between the groups. Forth, there was a presence of correlation between HNR and NHR of the vowel and HNR of the sentences. Accordingly, this study concluded that LTAS, spectral slope, and HNR were predictive parameters of connected speech voice for dysphonic voice.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.179-200
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• 2007

In voice pathology, various measurements calculated from pitch values are proposed to show voice quality. However, those measurements frequently seem to be inaccurate and unreliable because they are based on some wrong pitch values determined from pathological voice data. In order to solve the problem, we compared several pitch estimation methods to propose a better one in pathological voices. From the database of 99 pathological voice and 30 normal voice data, errors derived from pitch estimation were analyzed and compared between pathological and normal voice data or among the vowels produced by patients with benign vocal fold lesions. Results showed that gross pitch errors were observed in the cases of pathological voice data. From the types of pathological voices classified by the degree of aperiodicity in the speech signals, we found that pitch errors were closely related to the number of aperiodic segments. Also, the autocorrelation approach was found to be the most robust pitch estimation in the pathological voice data. It is desirable to conduct further research on the more severely pathological voice data in order to reduce pitch estimation errors.