Acoustic signal typing for evaluation of voice quality in tracheoesophageal speech

Summary: Because of the aperiodicity of many tracheoesophageal voices, acoustic analysis of the tracheoesophageal voice is less straightforward than that of the normal voice. This study presents the development and testing of an acoustic signal typing system based on visual inspection of a narrow-band spectrogram that can be used by researchers for classification of voice quality in tracheoesophageal speech. In addition to this classification system, a selection of acoustic measures [median fundamental frequency, standard deviation of fundamental frequency, jitter, percentage of voiced (%Voiced), harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), glottal-to-noise excitation (GNE) ratio, and band energy difference (BED)] was computed to provide more insight into the acoustic components of tracheoesophageal voice quality. For clinical relevance, relationships between the acoustic signal types and an overall judgment of the voice were investigated as well. Results showed that the four acoustic signal types form a good basis for performing more acoustic analyses and give a good impression of the overall quality of the voice

Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

This paper analyzes the nature of the process involved in optional vowel reduction in Hungarian, and the acoustic structure of schwa variants in spontaneous speech. The study focuses on the acoustic patterns of both the basic realizations of Hungarian vowels and their realizations as neutral vowels (schwas), as well as on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of algorithms for the recognition of both types of realizations from the speech waveform. The authors address the question whether schwas form a unified group of vowels or they show some dependence on the originally intended articulation of the vowel they stand for. The acoustic study uses a database consisting of over 4,000 utterances extracted from continuous speech, and recorded from 19 speakers. The authors propose methods for the recognition of neutral vowels depending on the various vowels they replace in spontaneous speech. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are calculated and used for the training of Hidden Markov Models. The recognition system was trained on 2,500 utterances and then tested on 1,500 utterances. The results show that a neutral vowel can be detected in 72% of all occurrences. Stressed and unstressed syllables can be distinguished in 92% of all cases. Neutralized vowels do not form a unified group of phoneme realizations. The pronunciation of schwa heavily depends on the original articulation configuration of the intended vowel

Developing and testing a nurse-led intervention to support bereavement in relatives in the intensive care (BRIC study): a protocol of a pre-post intervention study

BACKGROUND: When a patient is approaching death in the intensive care unit (ICU), patients' relatives must make a rapid transition from focusing on their beloved one's recovery to preparation for their unavoidable death. Bereaved relatives may develop complicated grief as a consequence of this burdensome situation; however, little is known about appropriate options in quality care supporting bereaved relatives and the prevalence and predictors of complicated grief in bereaved relatives of deceased ICU patients in the Net