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Published on: December 2, 2011
Modeling of Breathy Voice Quality Using Pitch-strength Estimates
David A Eddins1, Supraja Anand2, Arturo Camacho3
1Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida.
Background:
The characteristic voice quality of a speaker conveys important linguistic, paralinguistic, and vocal health-related information. Pitch strength refers to the salience of pitch sensation in a sound and was recently reported to be strongly correlated with the magnitude of perceived breathiness based on a small number of voice stimuli.
Objective:
The current study examined the relationship between perceptual judgments of breathiness and computational estimates of pitch strength based on the Aud-SWIPE (P-NP) algorithm for a large number of voice stimuli (330 synthetic and 57 natural).
Methods And Results:
Similar to the earlier study, the current results confirm a strong relationship between estimated pitch strength and listener judgments of breathiness such that low pitch-strength values are associated with voices that have high perceived breathiness. Based on this result, a model was developed for the perception of breathy voice quality using a pitch-strength estimator. Regression functions derived between the pitch-strength estimates and perceptual judgments of breathiness obtained from matching task revealed a linear relationship for a subset of the natural stimuli. We then used this function to obtain predicted breathiness values for the synthetic and the remaining natural stimuli.
Conclusions:
Predicted breathiness values from our model were highly correlated with the perceptual data for both types of stimuli. Systematic differences between the breathiness of natural and synthetic stimuli are discussed.
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