Voice Evaluation by Acoustic Analysis

Abstract

For the acoustic evaluation of pathological voice, seven features are found to be useful: 1) average pitch frequency, 2) spectral characteristics of quasiperiodic glottal sound source, 3) relative energy level and frequency characteristics of turbulent noise produced at the glottis, 4) perturbation characteristics of pitch periods, 5) perturbation characteristics of peak amplitudes, 6) perturbation characteristics of quasiperiodic glottal sound source, and 7) perturbation characteristics of the vocal noise. For the automatic and accurate measurment of acoustic parameters related to these features, sophysticated methods are described, including a novel pitch detection algorithm and an adaptive comb filtering method to separate vocal noise from harmonic components.