5 research outputs found
The voice of COVID-19: acoustic correlates of infection in sustained vowels
COVID-19 is a global health crisis that has been affecting many aspects of
our daily lives throughout the past year. The symptomatology of COVID-19 is
heterogeneous with a severity continuum. A considerable proportion of symptoms
are related to pathological changes in the vocal system, leading to the
assumption that COVID-19 may also affect voice production. For the very first
time, the present study aims to investigate voice acoustic correlates of an
infection with COVID-19 on the basis of a comprehensive acoustic parameter set.
We compare 88 acoustic features extracted from recordings of the vowels /i:/,
/e:/, /o:/, /u:/, and /a:/ produced by 11 symptomatic COVID-19 positive and 11
COVID-19 negative German-speaking participants. We employ the Mann-Whitney U
test and calculate effect sizes to identify features with the most prominent
group differences. The mean voiced segment length and the number of voiced
segments per second yield the most important differences across all vowels
indicating discontinuities in the pulmonic airstream during phonation in
COVID-19 positive participants. Group differences in the front vowels /i:/ and
/e:/ are additionally reflected in the variation of the fundamental frequency
and the harmonics-to-noise ratio, group differences in back vowels /o:/ and
/u:/ in statistics of the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the spectral
slope. Findings of this study can be considered an important proof-of-concept
contribution for a potential future voice-based identification of individuals
infected with COVID-19.Comment: 8 page