• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.39-45
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• 2015

This research was conducted to investigate the voice related needs of occupational voice users. The data collected from teachers(379), tele-marketers(156), therapists(50) was classified according to its content, by colaizzi's inductive categorical analysis. The voice related needs are classified into 3 big categories, 1) how to use, 2) how to care, 3) how to be healthy. Again the category 'how to use' my voice was into 6 sub-categories: (1) efficiently, (2) as I desired, (3) without pain(discomfort), (4) expressively, (5) phonation (methods) and (6) clear articulation. The result showed that the needs from 3 groups of occupational voice users reflect their own environment which they have to use their voice as well as the voice characteristics wanted from their specific listeners.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.175-181
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• 2008

The aim of this study was to survey 'voice preference' of children from among three voice pitches, which are high-pitch, mid-pitch and low pitch, and understand acoustic characteristics of the best voice chosen. To record distinctive pitches, Dr. Speech(ver. 4.0 Tiger Electronics) was used and we analyzed their choices. Also, we measured subglottal air pressure in aerodynamic analyze and phonatory aerodynamic system(Model 6600, KAY) was used. As a result children preferred to the low-pitch yet there was not any difference by sex. We fined them to prefer higher HNR voice to lower jitter and shimmer voice rate.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.151-159
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the prevalence of voice disorders and the Korean voice handicap index in the elderly. For this study, 169 elderly performed two types of questionnaires and vowel /a/ prolongation. Self-reported voice symptoms and the Korean voice handicap index were analyzed and acoustic voice evaluation was performed by MDVP. The results showed that the prevalence of voice disorders in the elderly are significantly higher than that of adults in self-reports. In acoustic evaluation, 32.2% of the male elderly and 40.9% of the female elderly exceeded the thresholds of Jitter (%), Shimmer (%) and NHR. In addition, Korean voice handicap index scores of the female elderly are significantly higher than those of female adults. These findings indicate the high frequency of voice disorders in the elderly and the need to focus on this group. Additional studies on the voice related quality of life for the elderly are needed.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.149-154
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• 2018

As the range of professional voice users are expanding, interest towards voice increases as well. Especially as teachers compose the occupational group, exposed to high risk of voice disorder, it is necessary to identify the cause of speech problems and speech disorders. The purpose of this study is to analyze the voice characteristics of teachers and to investigate the causes of voice disorders. From 2000 to 2018, 414 studies were found under a combinated set search words of 'profession', 'Teacher', 'Professional Voice User', 'Voice', 'Voice disorders', 'Risk' and out of them, 8 studies were selected as final focus analysis subjects. The qualitative evaluation was carried out by modifying the Quality: checklist for assessing the Risk of bias. The study confirmed that voice misuse frequently occurred to teachers when they used their voice and this feature was affected by the environment. These results suggest that environment improvement of teachers' speech abuse and consistent voice education are necessary.

• MALSORI
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• v.68
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• pp.65-74
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• 2008

A statistical parametric speech synthesis system based on the hidden Markov models (HMMs) has grown in popularity over the last few years, because it needs less memory and low computation complexity and is suitable for the embedded system in comparison with a corpus-based unit concatenation text-to-speech (TTS) system. It also has the advantage that voice characteristics of the synthetic speech can be modified easily by transforming HMM parameters appropriately. In this paper, we present experimental results of voice characteristics conversion using the HMM-based Korean speech synthesis system. The results have shown that conversion of voice characteristics could be achieved using a few sentences uttered by a target speaker. Synthetic speech generated from adapted models with only ten sentences was very close to that from the speaker dependent models trained using 646 sentences.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.95-104
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• 2012

Thyroidectomy patients may have vocal paralysis or paresis, resulting in a breathy voice. The aim of this study was to investigate the aerodynamic and acoustic characteristics of a breathy voice in thyroidectomy patients. Thirty-five subjects who have vocal paralysis after thyroidectomy participated in this study. According to perceptual judgements by three speech pathologists and one phonetic scholar, subjects were divided into two groups: breathy voice group (n = 21) and non-breathy voice group (n = 14). Aerodynamic analysis was conducted by three tasks (Voicing Efficiency, Maximum Sustained Phonation, Vital Capacity) and acoustic analysis was measured during Maximum Sustained Phonation task. The breathy voice group had significantly higher subglottal pressure and more pathological voice characteristics than the non breathy voice group. Showing 94.1% classification accuracy in result logistic regression of aerodynamic analysis, the predictor parameters for breathiness were maximum sound pressure level, sound pressure level range, phonation time of Maximum Sustained Phonation task and Pitch range, peak air pressure, and mean peak air pressure of Voicing Efficiency task. Classification accuracy of acoustic logistic regression was 88.6%, and five frequency perturbation parameters were shown as predictors. Vocal paralysis creates air turbulence at the glottis. It fluctuates frequency-related parameters and increases aspiration in high frequency areas. These changes determine perceptual breathiness.

• MALSORI
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• no.48
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• pp.19-33
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• 2003

Sasang Constitutional Medicine, a branch of traditional Korean medicine, believes that the health of human beings can be promoted by taking advantage of the fact that people have different constitutions. It utilizes the characteristics in human voice to diagnose the constitution of the patients. This study aims at establishing the relationship between Sasang constitutions and their corresponding voice characteristics by investigating source-related variables. Voice recordings of 23 patients from three different constitutions were obtained whose constitutions had been already diagnosed by the experts in the fields. Fundamental frequency related variables (average pitch, maximum/minimum pitch, pitch range), phonation type, speaking tempo were measured and analyzed for each group. The phonation type seemed to be a possible candidate for a successful variable to determine constitution. No statistically significant relationship was manifested between other variables and constitutions. Despite its failure to firmly establish the relationship between voice and constitutions, the current study suggests that future research should include not only source-related variables

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.41-47
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• 2017

The main advantage of the statistical parametric speech synthesis is its flexibility in changing voice characteristics. A personalized text-to-speech(TTS) system can be implemented by combining a speech synthesis system and a voice transformation system, and it is widely used in many application areas. It is known that the fundamental frequency and the spectral envelope of speech signal can be independently modified to convert the voice characteristics. Also it is important to maintain naturalness of the transformed speech. In this paper, a speech synthesis system based on Hidden Markov Model(HMM-based speech synthesis, HTS) using the STRAIGHT vocoder is constructed and voice transformation is conducted by modifying the fundamental frequency and spectral envelope. The fundamental frequency is transformed in a scaling method, and the spectral envelope is transformed through frequency warping method to control the speaker's vocal tract length. In particular, this study proposes a voice transformation method using the correlation between fundamental frequency and vocal tract length. Subjective evaluations were conducted to assess preference and mean opinion scores(MOS) for naturalness of synthetic speech. Experimental results showed that the proposed voice transformation method achieved higher preference than baseline systems while maintaining the naturalness of the speech quality.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.32-38
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• 1996

The preservation of the voice-producing mechanism is an important feature in the management of laryngeal cancer by radiotherapy. But, radiation therapy has certain side effects such as mucositis, tissue edema, necrosis and fibrosis which could effect on normal voice production. Several subjective studies that used questionnaires and auditory perceptual judgements of voice have been interpreted to mean that radiation results in a normal or near-normal voice. Objective evidence of the status of vocal function after radiation treatment, however, is still lacking. We analyzed the changes that occur in voice parameters in a group of patients undergoing radiation therapy, in order to determine the effect of radiation on voice quality. In this study acoustic, aerodynamic measures of vocal function were used to determine the characteristics of voice production. We found that voice parameters in early glottic cancer changed meaningfully comparing to normal larynx with or without radiation and radiation therapy has an little effect on normal larynx.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.137-158
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• 2022

Purpose As artificial intelligence voice agents (AIVA) have been widely adopted in services, diverse forms of their voices, which are the main interface with users, have been experimented. The purpose of this study is to examine how users evaluate vocal characteristics (gender, voice pitch, and voice pace) of AIVA, depending on prior research on human voice attractiveness. Design/methodology/approach This study employed an experimental survey which 516 participated in. Each participant was randomly assigned into one of eight situations (e.g., male - higher pitch - faster pace) and listened a AIVA voice sample, which introduce weather information. Next, a participant answered three consequence factors (attractiveness, trust, and anthropomorphism). Findings The results reveal that female voices of AIVA were perceived as more attractive and trustworthy than male voices. As far as voice pitch goes, while lower-pitch voices were preferred in female voices, higher-pitch voices were preferred in male voices. Finally, faster voices of AIVA were more attractive than slower voices.