• 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

• Speech Sciences
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• v.3
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• pp.132-147
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• 1998

Previously developed methods for pitch modification have not been based on the voice source model. Therefore, the synthesized speech often sounds unnatural although it may be highly intelligible. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the alteration of a voice source signal with pitch period and to establish the pitch-modification rule based on the result of this analysis. We examine the alteration of the interval of closing phase, closed phase and open phase using the excitation waveform as the pitch increases. In comparison to the previous methods which performed directly on the speech signal, the pitch modification method based on a voice source model shows high intelligibility and naturalness. This study might benefit the application to the speaker identification and the voice color conversion. Therefore the proposed method will provide high quality synthetic speech.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.5-10
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• 1998

Voice rehabilitation is very important concerning in laryngectomees. Esophageal speech is a common and widely used method of voice restoration. But, until now there is no reliable data which shows the aerodynamic characteristics of esophageal speech. In order to evaluate the vocal quality of normal laryngeal and esophageal speech, several aerodynamic parameters were measured in 13 adults with normal laryngeal voice and 2 excellent esophageal speakers using Aerophone II voice function analyzer. The examined parameters were maximal flow rate, mean airflow rate, subglottic pressure, vocal efficiency, glottic resistance, maximal phonation time and mean sound pressure level. In vocal efficiency, there is no difference between two groups, but in other parameters, marked differences were showed in esophageal speakers, especially mean resistance. Results indicates that esophageal speakers make the efficient voices with poor aerodynamic condition, comparing with normal laryngeal speakers.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.7 no.7
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• pp.896-904
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• 2004

In this paper, We present an efficient variable rate speech coder for spectral efficiency and packet processing technique for packet loss compensation of a voice codec with 10msec frame in VoIP service. Through disconnecting the users from the spectral resource during silence interval of about 60% period, a variable rate voice coder based on a voice activity detection(VAD) can increase spectral gain by two times. The performance of the method was analyzed by variation of detected voice activity factor and degraded speech frame ratio under various background noise level, and compared those of G.729B of ITU-T 8kbps standard speech codec. A method to compensate lost packets utilized addition of recovery data to a main stream and error concealment scheme for speech quality enhancement, the performance is verified by reconstructed speech quality. The proposed scheme can achieve spectral gain by two times or enhance speech quality by 3dB through reserved bandwidth of VAD. Therefore, the proposed method can enhance a spectral efficiency or speech quality of VoIP.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.40-50
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• 2005

HoQ (House of Quality) provides an effective tool not only to arrange and evaluate VoC (Voice of Customers) and VoE (Voice of Engineers), but also to link and combine VoC and VoE, thereby presenting explicit directions for quality improvement. There have been, however, few researches on the HoQ framework in the IT industry. The case study discussed here serves an illustration of the applicability and usefulness of the HoQ approach to website quality improvement. The proposed HoQ framework shows great potentials since customers needs are explicitly considered in the framework, and it helps website administrators develop better web services by providing guidelines for reengineering the website operations.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.11-16
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• 2001

Background and Objectives : A burn injury to the glottis differs from a burn injury to the trachea, bronchi, and lung parenchyma, in that thermal injury does not occur to any significant degree below the level of the larynx, due to the effective cooling of air by the upper airway and to reflex closure of the vocal cords from a blast of hot air. Therefore, the laryngeal inhalation injury give rise to airway problem and voice change. The objectives of this study is to assess management of laryngeal inhalation injury and voice change after management. Materials and Methods : Voice choses and laryngeal injuries of eight laryngeal inhalation patients were analyzed through questionnaire, voice dynamic laboratory, and laryngeal stroboscopy. Operative management was performed to five patients for airway patiency and vocal cord movement on laryngeal pathology ind voice therapy was performed to all patients. One-year after, voice changes and laryngeal injuries were reanalyzed with same methods. Results : Vocal breathiness, decreased voice intensity, reduced voice range, and easy fatigability were major complaints of laryngeal inhalation patients. Glottic stenosis were developed to five of eight patients, and vocal cord atrophy, bowing were developed to others. Vocal cord mucosal waves were significantly decreased in all patients. Jitter(%), Shimmer(dB) were increased and Maximal phonation time(MPT) was decreased. One-year after, subjective voice changes and objective voice parameters were improved. And vocal cord mucosal waves were recovered in all patients. Conclusions : Subjective voice quality and objective voice parameters were improved after operative management for laryngeal pathology and voice therapy. And we observed recovery of vocal fold mucosal waves by laryngeal stroboscopy. We think that early preventable tracheotomy is necessary to reduce the laryngeal contact injury in laryngeal inhalation patients.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.17-21
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• 2005

Purpose : To evaluate the voices of irradiated patients with early glottic carcinoma and to compare these with the voices of healthy volunteers. Materials and Methods : The voice samples (sustained vowel) of seventeen male patients who had been irradiated for T1a glottic squamous carcinoma at least 1 year prior to the study were analyzed with objective voice analyzer (acoustic voice analysis, aerodynamic test, and videostroboscopic analysis) and compared with those of a normal group of twenty age- and sex-matched volunteers. Average fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and noise-to-harmonic ratio were obtained for acoustic voice analysis. Maximal phonation time, mean flow rate, intensity, subglottic pressure, glottal resistance, glottal efficiency, and glottal power were obtained for aerodynamic test. Results : The irradiated group presented higher values of shimmer in acoustic voice analysis. There was no significant difference between two groups in other parameters. Conclusion : In this study all the objective voice parameters except shimmer were no4 significantly different between the irradiated group and the control group. These results suggest that the voice quality is minimally affected by radiation therapy for 71 a glottic carcinoma.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.1919-1926
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• 2016

The people who complain of pain due to voice causes such as vocal cord nodules is increasing year by year. If the voice is changed, it is possible to give to colleagues discomfort or inconvenience during conversation. In this paper, we propose a way to reduce discomfort by improving the husky voice during the conversation. A VBF (voice boosting filter) is firstly designed to improve the husky voices. This filter may further emphasize the formant frequency components than the frequency components around the formant frequency, because the value is relatively greater than the other frequency. And a fixed-point type DSP chipset, TMS320F2812 is applied to the system, the operating frequency is 150MHz. The system was implemented as a compact for use as a portable, its size is $2.5cm{\times}10cm$. Through the test using three husky voices with some type of statement, it was satisfactory in processing speed and sound quality improvement.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.292-294
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• 2007

This study was designed to compare the translated patient's subjective rating scales for voice evaluation (Voice Handicap Index; VHI, Voice-Related Quality of Life; V-RQOL, Voice Rating Score; VRS) into Korean, taken from 24 professional voice users diagnosed with organic voice disorders. First, the correlation amongh those scales were observed. Second, the correlation between the patient's subjective rating scales and acoustic measures (Jitter%, Shimmer%, NHR) were examined. Third, those scales were compared by clinician's objective scale (G in GRBAS scale). Results indicated that significant correlations among the patients' subjective rating scales and significant correlations of clinician's rating scale with jitter% and Shimmer%, but not with NHR were observed. In addition, there were significant correlations of G with VHI and VHI-P (one of subscale of VHI). However, none of acoustic measures were correlated with the patient's subjective rating scales.