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Perception of aperiodicity in pathological voice
Jody Kreiman1, Bruce R Gerratt
1Division of Head and Neck Surgery, UCLA School of Medicine, 31-24 Rehab Center, Los Angeles, California 90095-1794, USA. jkreiman@ucla.edu
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|May 19, 2005
Summary
Listeners struggle to perceive jitter and shimmer independently in pathological voices. Noise levels impact the detection of these voice perturbation measures, suggesting they are not reliable standalone indicators of vocal quality.
Area of Science:
- Speech Science
- Acoustic Phonetics
- Psychoacoustics
Background:
- Jitter, shimmer, and noise are acoustic voice signal characteristics.
- Their perceptual significance in pathological voices lacks psychoacoustic validation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the psychoacoustic role of jitter, shimmer, and noise-to-signal ratio in perceived vocal quality.
- To determine if these acoustic measures independently correlate with listener perception of natural pathological voice tokens.
Main Methods:
- Listeners adjusted synthetic voice parameters (jitter, shimmer, noise-to-signal ratio) to match natural pathological voice samples.
- Listener agreement was assessed for each parameter adjustment.
Main Results:
- High listener agreement was observed for noise-to-signal ratio adjustments.
- Listener agreement was poor for jitter and shimmer adjustments.
- Listener insensitivity and difficulty isolating jitter and shimmer were identified as reasons for poor agreement, influenced by noise levels.
Conclusions:
- Jitter and shimmer are not reliable independent indices for perceived vocal quality in pathological voices.
- Their perceptual impact is intertwined with the overall acoustic pattern, particularly noise.
- Acoustic contributions to spectrally shaped noise are more relevant than isolated jitter and shimmer for vocal quality perception.