INTRODUCTION Endotracheal intubation can produce various degrees of temporary and sometimes permanent damage to the laryngotracheal mechanism. Recent development of computer based voice analysis technology can now detect a minute changes in acoustic waveforms which a normal human ear cannot. In the study we compared and analyzed the acoustic waveforms of 35 patients undergoing surgery under int...

In order to produce natural sounding output, corpus-based speech synthesis systems need to be able to properly model the acoustic variability in the corpus. Creaky voice is a voice quality frequently produced in many languages, in both read and conversational speech settings. However, the creaky excitation displays different acoustic characteristics than modal excitations and is, hence, not sui...

Background: Repeated efforts by researchers to impose voice changes by laryngeal surface electrical stimulation (SES) have come to no avail. This present pre-experimental study employed a novel method for SES application so as to evoke the motor potential of the internal superior laryngeal nerve (ISLN) and create voice changes.Methods: Thirty-two normal individuals (22 females and 10 males) par...

This study examines acoustic and articulatory EMA data of two female speakers (American and Japanese) spontaneously producing emotional speech while engaged in an informal telephone-type conversation. A set of control data in which the speakers imitated or read the original emotional utterance was also recorded; for the American speaker, the intonation pattern was also imitated. The results sug...

This paper reports our investigation of the acoustic effects of vocal training for amateur singers and of the contribution of those effects to perceived vocal quality. Recording singing voices before and after vocal training and then analyzing changes in acoustic parameters with a focus on features unique to singing voices, we found that two different F0 fluctuations (vibrato and overshoot) and...

Both voice gender perception and speech perception rely on neuronal populations located in the peri-sylvian areas. However, whilst functional imaging studies suggest a left vs. right hemisphere and anterior vs. posterior dissociation between voice and speech categorization, psycholinguistic studies on talker variability suggest that these two processes share common mechanisms. In this study, we...

The aim of this study is to assess the consequences of thyroid surgery on the voice of patients, in order to identify various perturbations which this surgery may provoke, and also to reveal possible compensatory strategies or readjustments that the patient may develop. The assessment was based on the analysis of acoustic signals, from which a large amount of cues related to voice quality was e...

Voice quality conveys both linguistic and paralinguistic information, and can be distinguished by acoustic source characteristics. We label objective voice quality categories based on the harmonic structure (H1-H2) and the mean autocorrelation ratio of each phone. Results from a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification experiment show that these features are predictive of Perceptual Linear P...

This paper investigates the temporal excitation patterns of creaky voice. Creaky voice is a voice quality frequently used as a phrase-boundary marker, but also as a means of portraying attitude, affective states and even social status. Consequently, the automatic detection and modelling of creaky voice may have implications for speech technology applications. The acoustic characteristics of cre...