Cepstral Acoustic Measurements: Influence of Speech Task and Degree of Vocal Deviation.

Objective: To analyze whether there are differences in the cepstral measures obtained in different speech tasks, depending on the presence and degree of vocal deviation, and to analyze if there is a correlation between the cepstral measures obtained from different speech tasks and the general degree of vocal deviation.

Method: Analysis of 258 vocal samples of the sustained vowel [a] and connected speech (counting numbers) from a database, including 160 dysphonic and 98 nondysphonic voices. The counting number samples were edited in three different durations: counting from 1 to 10, from 1 to 11, and from 1 to 20.

Accuracy and Cut-Off Values of Cepstral Measures in the Clinical Evaluation of Brazilian Portuguese Speakers.

Objective: To identify the accuracy and cut-off values of the cepstral peak prominence (CPP) and cepstral peak prominence-smoothed (CPPS) obtained from different speech tasks, to identify dysphonic voices in Brazilian Portuguese speakers, and to verify the correlation between these measures and the overall severity of dysphonia (OS).

Method: In a study with 376 subjects-277 with dysphonia and 99 controls-we recorded four speech tasks and assessed OS with a visual analog scale. We extracted CPP and CPPS from these recordings and analyzed them using receiver operating characteristic curves to determine cut-off values and other performance metrics (area under curve, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, and likelihood ratios).

Spectral and cepstral measurements in women with behavioral dysphonia.

Purpose: To investigate whether there are differences in cepstral and spectral acoustic measures between women with behavioral dysphonia with and without laryngeal lesions and verify whether there is a correlation between such measures and the auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice quality.

Methods: The sample comprised 78 women with behavioral dysphonia without laryngeal lesions (BDWOL) and 68 with behavioral dysphonia with laryngeal lesions (vocal nodules) (BDWL). Cepstral peak prominence (CPP), cepstral peak prominence-smoothed (CPPS), spectral decrease, and H1-H2 (difference between the amplitude of the first and second harmonics) were extracted.

VoxMore: technological artifact to assist voice acoustic evaluation in the teaching-learning process and clinical practice.

Purpose: to present a technological artifact, the VoxMore plugin, to assist the academic teaching of voice acoustic assessment, as well as to optimize the speech therapy intervention in the practice of vocal clinics.

Methods: this is a multidisciplinary methodological study for the development of a technological artifact, a plugin, to be used in the Praat software. This tool performs vocal acoustic analysis and generates a report, with information and images referring to the domains of time, frequency, time-frequency, and que-frequency, as well as values of acoustic measures related to fundamental frequency (f0), period measures, disturbance measures of the period of f0, f0 amplitude perturbation measurements, spectral measurements, glottal noise measurements and cepstral measurements.

Performance of Acoustic Measures for the Discrimination Among Healthy, Rough, Breathy, and Strained Voices Using the Feedforward Neural Network.

Objective: To identify and evaluate the best set of acoustic measures to discriminate among healthy, rough, breathy, and strained voices.

Methods: This study used the vocal samples of the sustained /ε/ vowel from 251 patients with the vocal complaints, among which 51, 80, 63, and 57 patients exhibited healthy, rough, breathy, and strained voices, respectively. Twenty-two acoustic measures were extracted, and feature selection was applied to reduce the number of combinations of acoustic measures and obtain an optimal subset of measures according to the information gain attribute ranking algorithm.