International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA 1999) Florence, Italy September 1-3, 1999

Automatic Assessment of Voice Quality using Fundamental Harmonic Normalised Spectra and Gaussian Mixtures

M. A. McGillion (1), R. T. Ritchings (1), C. J. Moore (2)

(1) Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester, UK
(2) North Western Medical Physics, Christie Hospital, Manchester, UK

Classification of speech data from male volunteers (normal) and patients recovering from cancer of the larynx (abnormal) is discussed. Analysis of normals and abnormals has shown that there is a significant distinction in the fundamental frequency and harmonic envelope between these groups during constant phonation of vowel sounds. This work proposes a method of deriving the Fundamental-Harmonic Normalised (FHN) spectrum from the speech data and fitting a mixture of Gaussians to model the distribution of power within the FHN spectrum. The aim of this work is to provide a set of features for subsequent classification using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN).

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  McGillion, M. A. / Ritchings, R. T. / Moore, C. J. (1999): "Automatic assessment of voice quality using fundamental harmonic normalised spectra and Gaussian mixtures", In MAVEBA-1999, 128-131.