The provisioning of an appropriate level of perceptual speech quality is crucial for the successful deployment of Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP). Today’s heterogeneous multimedia networks include links that introduce bit errors into the voice data stream. These errors are detected by the IP packet transport protocol and result in packet losses which eventually degrade the speech qualit...

The purpose of this study is to determine if the phonemic voice quality distinction of Dinka is also conveyed in songs. Acoustic measurements (formant tracking and spectral regression) were applied for the first time to a song data set. The results clearly pointed towards a neutralization of the voice quality distinction in songs. A perception experiment was performed to back up the results of ...

The ITU-T’s Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) is an intrusive objective assessment tool that has been widely used in telecommunications and IP networks. 3SQM is an ITU-T standard for single-sided non-intrusive quality measurement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the accuracy of PESQ and 3SQM in evaluating voice quality over live 3G networks. We set up a testbed based on...

This study investigates the academic and clinical preparation a speech-language pathologist receives in the area of voice. The purpose is to determine how to structure continuing education and specialty training in vocology, defined as the science and practice of voice habilitation. Surveys were sent to the graduate programs in speech-language pathology accredited by the American Speech-Languag...

Parkinson's disease related speech and voice impairment have significant impact on quality of life measures. LSVT(®)LOUD voice and speech therapy (Lee Silverman Voice Therapy) has demonstrated scientific efficacy and clinical effectiveness, but musically based voice and speech therapy has been underexplored as a potentially useful method of rehabilitation. We undertook a pilot, open-label study...

Pathological speech usually refers to the condition of speech distortion resulting from atypicalities in voice and/or in the articulatory mechanisms owing to disease, illness or other physical or biological insult to the production system. While automatic evaluation of speech intelligibility and quality could come in handy in these scenarios to assist in diagnosis and treatment design, the many...

In this paper we present a flexible framework for parametric speech analysis and synthesis with high quality. It constitutes an extended source-filter model. The novelty of the proposed speech processing system lies in its extended means to use a Deterministic plus Stochastic Model (DSM) for the estimation of the unvoiced stochastic component from a speech recording. Further contributions are t...