An Investigation of Vocal Tract Characteristics for Acoustic Discrimination of Pathological Voices

Abstract

This paper investigates the effectiveness of measures related to vocal tract characteristics in classifying normal and pathological speech. Unlike conventional approaches that mainly focus on features related to the vocal source, vocal tract characteristics are examined to determine if interaction effects between vocal folds and the vocal tract can be used to detect pathological speech. Especially, this paper examines features related to formant frequencies to see if vocal tract characteristics are affected by the nature of the vocal fold-related pathology. To test this hypothesis, stationary fragments of vowel /aa/ produced by 223 normal subjects, 472 vocal fold polyp subjects, and 195 unilateral vocal cord paralysis subjects are analyzed. Based on the acoustic-articulatory relationships, phonation for pathological subjects is found to be associated with measures correlated with a raised tongue body or an advanced tongue root. Vocal tract-related features are also found to be statistically significant from the Kruskal-Wallis test in distinguishing normal and pathological speech. Classification results demonstrate that combining the formant measurements with vocal fold-related features results in improved performance in differentiating vocal pathologies including vocal polyps and unilateral vocal cord paralysis, which suggests that measures related to vocal tract characteristics may provide additional information in diagnosing vocal disorders.

Maxillary arch dimensions associated with acoustic parameters in prepubertal children

“…Variability in these structural components explains the disparities in acoustic features among speakers. Strong correlation has been shown to exist between vocal tract morphology and vocal characteristics in both dysphonic 1 and nondysphonic subjects. 1,2 Jesus et al 3 reported higher values for the second formant (second preferred harmonic) in patients with unilateral vocal fold paralysis, in comparison to controls.…”

“…Strong correlation has been shown to exist between vocal tract morphology and vocal characteristics in both dysphonic 1 and nondysphonic subjects. 1,2 Jesus et al 3 reported higher values for the second formant (second preferred harmonic) in patients with unilateral vocal fold paralysis, in comparison to controls. Similarly, Titze 2 described clustering of the first two formants in patients with unilateral vocal fold paralysis, alluding to the narrowing of the vocal tract in compensation for inefficient phonation.…”

A Packet Loss Concealment Technique Improving Quality of Service for Wideband Speech Coding in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…To simulate burst packet loss conditions, the burstiness of the packet losses was set to 0.99, where the mean and maximum consecutive packet losses were measured as 1.9 and 5.6 frames, respectively. First, the log spectral distortion (LSD) [25] was measured between the original and decoded signal. It is defined as…”

Feature enhancement for classifier optimization and dimensionality reduction

“…Speech pathology detection studies in literature involve working on various databases. Few studies use private databases collected in local hospitals [9][12] [13] [14], with one or multiple pathologies. Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) dataset commercialized by KayPENTAX is used widely in the literature [5] [15].…”