OBJECTIVES To assess the merits of computer-aided voice analysis procedures for very irregular voices of patients after total and laser surgical partial laryngectomy, and to characterize qualitative differences in speech and voice function between these 2 groups of patients. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING University hospital in Göttingen, Germany PATIENTS Twenty-nine patients with ...

A number of different approaches have been utilized in recent years for the treatment of Parkinson's disease with varying effects on associated communication disorders. In particular, the drug treatments based on levodopa therapy and, more recently, deep brain stimulation of the sub-thalamic nucleus (STN-DBS) have yielded variable effects on the speech disorders exhibited by the majority of per...

Introduction: Essential vocal tremor (EVT) is vocal tremor occurring in an individual diagnosed with essential tremor and is an action induced tremor that occurs during speech production. It causes fewer communication attempts, difficulty initiating and maintaining phonation, effortful speaking avoidance of social events trouble sustaining relationship leading to impair quality of life for such...

background: health?related quality of life (hrql) and voice handicap index (vhi) of laryngectomies seem to be relevant regarding voice rehabilitation. the aim of this study is to assess the impact on hrql and vhi of laryngectomies, following voice rehabilitation. materials and methods: a retrospective study done at the ear, nose, and throat department of the emergency county hospital. sixty?fiv...

The requirements in terms of service flexibility, spectrum efficiency and speech quality introduce new challenges when voice is transmitted over packet and over wireless. This paper analyses the perceived voice quality when voice frames are transported on packet radio bearers of GSM/EDGE Radio Access Networks (GERAN) and are statistically multiplexed. The resulting quality depends on the link l...

Voice quality is recognized to play an important role for the rendering of emotions in verbal communication. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of a sinusoidal modeling processing framework for voice transformations finalized to the analysis and synthesis of emotive speech. A set of acoustic cues is selected to compare the voice quality characteristics of the speech signals on a voice c...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the validity of cepstral analyses against other conventional acoustic measures of voice quality in determining the perceptual impression in different motor speech disorders-hypokinetic and ataxic dysarthria, and speech tasks-prolonged vowels and connected speech. METHODS Prolonged vowel productions and connected speech samples (reading passages and monologues) from 4...

Prominence relations in speech are signaled by various ways including such phonetic means as voice fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. A less studied acoustic feature affecting prominence is the so called voice quality which is determined by changes in the airflow caused by different laryngeal settings. We investigated the changes in voice quality with respect to linguistic prosodic...

Individuals who undergo laryngectomy, surgical removal of the larynx, loose their normal voice. The breathing pattern is altered to permanent tracheostomal breathing. A new voice can be established by use of a segment in the lower part of the pharynx and the most upper part of the esophagus, the pharyngo-esophageal (PE) segment. This is the voice source in tracheoesophageal (TE) speech and esop...

This introduction to a special session on “Emotion in recognition and synthesis” highlights the need to understand the effects of affective speaker states on voice and speech on a psychophysiological level. It is argued that major advances in speaker verification, speech recognition, and natural-sounding speech synthesis depend on increases in our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying voice an...