The Effect of Microphone Type on Acoustical Measures of Synthesized Vowels

The purpose of this study was to compare microphones of different directionality, transducer type, and cost, with attention to their effects on acoustical measurements of period perturbation, amplitude perturbation, and noise using synthesized sustained vowel samples.

This was a repeated measures design.

Synthesized sustained vowel stimuli (with known acoustic characteristics and systematic changes in jitter, shimmer, and noise-to-harmonics ratio) were recorded by a variety of dynamic and condenser microphones. Files were then analyzed for mean fundamental frequency (fo), fo standard deviation, absolute jitter, shimmer in dB, peak-to-peak amplitude variation, and noise-to-harmonics ratio. Acoustical measures following recording were compared with the synthesized, known acoustical measures before recording.

Although informal analyses showed some differences among microphones, and analyses of variance showed that type of microphone is a significant predictor, t-tests revealed that none of the microphones generated different means compared with the generated acoustical measures.

In this sample, microphone type, directionality, and cost did not have a significant effect on the validity of acoustic measures.