Analyses of Sustained Vowels in Down Syndrome (DS): A Case Study Using Spectrograms and Perturbation Data to Investigate Voice Quality in Four Adults With DS

OBJECTIVES: Automatic acoustic measures of voice quality in people with Down syndrome (DS) do not reliably reflect perceived voice qualities. This study used acoustic data and visual spectral data to investigate the relationship between perceived voice qualities and acoustic measures. STUDY DESIGN: Participants were four young adults (two males, two females; mean age 23.8 years) with DS and severe learning disabilities, at least one of whom had a hearing impairment. METHODS: Participants imitated sustained /i/, /u/, and /a/ vowels at predetermined target pitches within their vocal range. Medial portions of vowels were analyzed, using Praat, for fundamental frequency, harmonics-to-noise ratio, jitter, and shimmer. Spectrograms were used to identify the presence and the duration of subharmonics at onset and offset, and mid-vowel. The presence of diplophonia was assessed by auditory evaluation. RESULTS: Perturbation data were highest for /a/ vowels and lowest for /u/ vowels. Intermittent productions of subharmonics were evident in spectrograms, some of which coincided with perceived diplophonia. The incidence, location, duration, and intensity of subharmonics differed between the four participants. CONCLUSIONS: Although the acoustic data do not clearly indicate atypical phonation, diplophonia and subharmonics reflect nonmodal phonation. The findings suggest that these may contribute to different perceived voice qualities in the study group and that these qualities may result from intermittent involvement of supraglottal structures. Further research is required to confirm the findings in the wider DS population, and to assess the relationships between voice quality, vowel type, and physiological measures

High speed digital imaging the difference of vocal fold vibration between modal, falsetto, vocal fry registers and whisper

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2004."A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, December 31, 2004."Also available in print.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Pan European Voice Conference - PEVOC 11

The Pan European VOice Conference (PEVOC) was born in 1995 and therefore in 2015 it celebrates the 20th anniversary of its establishment: an important milestone that clearly expresses the strength and interest of the scientific community for the topics of this conference. The most significant themes of PEVOC are singing pedagogy and art, but also occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. PEVOC takes place in different European cities every two years (www.pevoc.org). The PEVOC 11 conference includes a symposium of the Collegium Medicorum Theatri (www.comet collegium.com

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The MAVEBA Workshop proceedings, held on a biannual basis, collect the scientific papers presented both as oral and poster contributions, during the conference. The main subjects are: development of theoretical and mechanical models as an aid to the study of main phonatory dysfunctions, as well as the biomedical engineering methods for the analysis of voice signals and images, as a support to clinical diagnosis and classification of vocal pathologies

High speed laryngoscopic study of vocal fold vibratory patterns in normal and dysphonic subjects

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2005.Also available in print.Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2005.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Automatic voice disorder recognition using acoustic amplitude modulation features

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-117).An automatic dysphonia recognition system is designed that exploits amplitude modulations (AM) in voice using biologically-inspired models. This system recognizes general dysphonia and four subclasses: hyperfunction, A-P squeezing, paralysis, and vocal fold lesions. The models developed represent processing in the auditory system at the level of the cochlea, auditory nerve, and inferior colliculus. Recognition experiments using dysphonic sentence data obtained from the Kay Elemetrics Disordered Voice Database suggest that our system provides complementary information to state-of-the-art mel-cepstral features. A model for analyzing AM in dysphonic speech is also developed from a traditional communications engineering perspective. Through a case study of seven disordered voices, we show that different AM patterns occur in different frequency bands. This perspective challenges current dysphonia analysis methods that analyze AM in the time-domain signal.by Nicolas Malyska.S.M

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions with Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) workshop came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the neonate to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other aspects of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years always in Firenze, Italy

Voice quality of children and young people with Down's Syndrome and its impact on listener judgement

Background: Voice quality in Down's syndrome (DS) is accepted as unusual, often perceived as harsh and whispery with lower pitch and altered nasal resonance. Less is known about the resulting impact, particularly in relation to how children and young people with DS are accepted by their peers. Method: This is a quantitative study of the voice quality of children and young people with DS compared to age-matched typically-developing (TD) controls. Expert raters use the Vocal Profile Analysis Scheme to perceptually rate voice, which is compared to instrumental analysis of fundamental frequency, perturbation measures and spectral tilt. The impact of typical and atypical voice quality is evaluated in a study of listener judgments of character, ability, age, gender and social desirability using a specially designed semantic-differential questionnaire completed by special-needs and mainstream education staff and TD peers based on audio-recordings. Results: Perceptually, a number of features, including lip, tongue and jaw settings, pharyngeal constriction and respiratory support were found to be atypical compared to controls, whilst other features, notably phonation type and nasality, echoed typical patterns but were more severe in presentation in the speakers with DS. Contrary to hypotheses only spectral tilt differed significantly in instrumental analysis. All groups of raters judged the speakers with DS significantly more negatively than controls across all questionnaire parameters. TD peers showed a strong preference for the company of TD children over those with DS. Conclusions: Perceptual differences are evident in the voices of children with DS, but these are not always supported by instrumental findings, perhaps indicating that the constellation of differences give rise to more negative perception. Close agreement between education staff groups suggests that children with DS are no more disadvantaged by the perception of teachers in mainstream than in special-schools; however particular difficulties are highlighted for the development of friendships with TD peers.sub_shsunpub352_ethesesunpu

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the neonate to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other aspects of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years always in Firenze, Italy. This edition celebrates twenty years of uninterrupted and succesfully research in the field of voice analysis

Classification of vocal fold vibration as regular or irregular in normal, voiced speech

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-97).Irregular phonation serves an important communicative function in human speech and occurs allophonically in American English. This thesis uses cues from both the temporal and frequency domains - such as fundamental frequency, normalized RMS amplitude, smoothed-energy-difference amplitude (a measure of abruptness in energy variations) and shift-difference amplitude (a measures of periodicity) -to classify segments of regular and irregular phonation in normal, continuous speech. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used to classify the tokens as examples of either regular or irregular phonation. The tokens are extracted from the TIMIT database, and are extracted from 151 different speakers. Both genders are well represented, and the tokens occur in various contexts within the utterance. The train-set uses 114 different speakers, while the test-set uses another 37 speakers. A total of 292 of 320 irregular tokens (recognition rate of 91.25% with a false alarm rate of 4.98%), and 4105 of 4320 regular tokens (recognition rate of 95.02% with a false alarm rate of 8.75%) are correctly identified.(cont.) The high recognition rates are an indicator that the set of acoustic cues are robust in accurately identifying a token as regular or irregular, even in cases where one or two acoustic cues show unexpected values. Also, analysis of irregular tokens in the training set (1331 irregular tokens) shows that 78% occur at word boundaries and 5% occur at syllable boundaries. Of the irregular tokens at syllable boundaries, 72% are either at the junction of a compound-word (e.g "outcast;") or at the junction of a base word and a suffix. Of the irregular tokens which do not occur at word or syllable boundaries, 70% occur adjacent to voiceless consonants mostly in utterance-final location. These observations support irregular phonation as a cue for syntactic boundaries in connected speech, and combined with the robust classification results to separate regular phonation from irregular phonation, could be used to improve speech recognition and lexical access models.by Kushan Krishna Surana.M.Eng