Diagnostic significance of phase spectrum in acoustic analysis of pathological voice

The paper regards the possibility of using new numerical features extracted from the phase spectrum of a speech signal for voice quality estimation in acoustic analysis for medical purposes. This novel approach does not require detection or estimation of the fundamental frequency and works on all types of speech signal: euphonic, dysphonic and aphonic as well. The experiment results presented in the paper are very promising: the developed F0-independant voice features are strongly correlated with two voice quality indicators: grade of hoarseness G (r>0.8) and roughness R (r>0.75) from GIRBAS scale, and exceed the standard voice parameters: jitter and shimmer.