Voice enhancement of male speakers with laryngeal neoplasm

In this paper an approach is presented which is aimed to enhance disordered male voices. This approach aims at highpitched voices with a severe degree of hoarseness. The goal of the study is to determine whether pitch modification combined with periodicity enhancement can improve the perceived quality of a disordered speech utterance. Signal manipulation is done pitch-synchronously, so, firstly pitch marks have to be detected. Then period enhancement is performed followed by a PSOLA based pitch modification step. Finally, the period enhancement is performed once more for the utterance with the lower pitch. Perceptual evaluations were performed by both professional speech and language pathologists and naive listeners to rate the subjective perceived enhancement of the voice. Results show that the modified voice has a reduced breathiness, whereas roughness seems not to be influenced by the processing. The most significant result from the naive listener test is a reduced perceived speaking effort.