Testing the reliability of Grade, Roughness and Breathiness scores by means of synthetic speech stimuli.

This article describes a synthesizer of disordered voices and reports a test of the reliability of Grade, Roughness, and Breathiness scores assigned to synthetic stimuli by eight expert listeners in two sessions. Speech stimuli [a], [i], [u], [ai], and [ia] were synthesized with three values of vocal frequency and four levels of vocal jitter and pulsatile additive noise each. The agreement and correlation of scores assigned by the same rater in different sessions, or by different raters in the same session, accord with published data.

Development and perceptual assessment of a synthesizer of disordered voices.

A synthesizer is based on a nonlinear wave-shaping model of the glottal area, an algebraic model of the glottal aerodynamics as well as concatenated-tube models of the trachea and vocal tract. Voice disorders are simulated by way of models of vocal frequency jitter and tremor, vocal amplitude shimmer and tremor, as well as pulsatile additive noise. Six experiments have been carried out to assess the synthesizer perceptually.

Validity of jitter measures in non-quasi-periodic voices. Part I: perceptual and computer performances in cycle pattern recognition.

The limit of about 5% for reliable quantification of jitter in sustained vowels of dysphonic voices-a widely accepted guideline-deserves critical analysis. The present study pertains to the effect of experience and training on the perceptual (visual) capability of correctly identifying periods in (highly) perturbed signals, and to a comparison of the performance of several programs for voice analysis. Synthesized realistic vowels (/a:/) with exactly known jitter (2.

Validity of jitter measures in non-quasi-periodic voices. Part II: the effect of noise.

In this paper the effect of noise on both perceptual and automatic evaluation of the glottal cycle length in irregular voice signals (sustained vowels) is studied. The reliability of four tools for voice analysis (MDVP, Praat, AMPEX, and BioVoice) is compared to visual inspection made by trained clinicians using two measures of voice signal irregularity: the jitter (J) and the coefficient of variation of the fundamental frequency (F0CV). The purpose is also to test to what extent of irregularity trained raters are capable of determining visually the glottal cycle length as compared to dedicated software tools.