LARYNX 1997 Marseille, France June 16-18, 1997

Acoustic Analysis of Dysphonic Voices: Descriptors and Methods

Jean Schoentgen, Fabrizio Bucella

Laboratory of Experimental Phonetics, Institute of Modern Languages and Phonetics, University Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

The theory of phonatory settings suggests that laryngeal pathologies become apparent in speech when they remove from their normal ranges one or several features of phonatory quality. Examples of relevant acoustic phenomena are additive noise due to turbulence, jitter of the glottis signal, shimmer, the spectral slope of the voice source signal, the frequencies and bandwidths of the formants, the regularity of voicing, and the range of intonation, etc. One of the goals of the study of speech produced by dysphonic speakers is the discovery of numerical attributes of the speech signal that are responsive to gradual changes in these acoustic phenomena with the link between attributes and phenomena being ideally one-to-one. A possible clinical application is the monitoring of patients' voices during treatment.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Schoentgen, Jean / Bucella, Fabrizio (1997): "Acoustic analysis of dysphonic voices: descriptors and methods", In LARYNX-1997, 37-46.