Prediction of Vocal Severity Within and Across Voice Types

Abstract

Fifty-one subjects representing diverse laryngeal etiologies recorded /a/ and /i/ to provide a study sample of 102 vowel sounds. Listeners categorized each vowel on the basis of four voice types (normal, breathy, hoarse, unclassified) and evaluated the degree of vocal abnormality on a 7-point scale. In addition to spectrographic noise (SN) classification, several acoustic measures based on period variability were entered into a nmltiple regression analysis for the prediction of vocal severity across and within voice types. In general, spectrographic noise and curvilinear derivatives of the period standard deviation (PSD) provided the best predictions of disorder severity. Different variables were the major predictors for different voice types. Several variables used in previous studies were inefficient as predictors of severity.

Acoustic and Perceptual Indicators of Normal and Pathological Voice

“…Our findings coincide with other studies linking roughness with frequency perturbation [15,17,22,51], although it has also been associated with both frequency and amplitude perturbation [7,18,61]. Conflicting with our results, other authors [19,20] report that roughness may be perceived in the absence of such perturbation.…”

“…We can see from figure 1 that, as in other studies, the judges associated breathy voices with high pitch [49][50][51] and low loudness [4,52], this last attribute showing higher values than for hoarseness. Hoarse voice (cluster 2) was characterized by low pitch, which corresponds with the fact that in clinical practice a voice with low pitch is likely to be judged as more severely dysphonic [39,52,53].…”

Acoustic Measures of Dysphonic Severity across and within Voice Types

“…Wolfe and Steinfatt [3] found a moderate correlation of 0.51 between rough ness and jitter for vowels /a/ and /i/ produced by 51 individuals with a wide variety of voice problems.…”

“…Stimuli for the scaling procedure were vowels ana lyzed in a previous study [3], The voices of 51 patients were selected from a larger group referred for voice therapy by staff otolaryngologists to the speech and hearing clinic of a large urban hospital over the course of a year. Subjects included 20 males and 31 females, with a mean age of 48 years and an age range of 15-79 years.…”

Acoustic Investigation of Vocal Quality following Treatment for Childhood Cerebellar Tumour

“…Increased levels of jitter have often been documented as a useful objective measure for identifying laryngeal dysfunction that impacts on vocal quality [33,34]. Typically, research has linked increased levels of jitter in a voice sample to the deviant perceptual voice features of roughness [19,21,[35][36][37][38].…”