Cepstral analysis of vocal dysperiodicities in disordered connected speech

Several studies have shown that the amplitude of the first rahmonic peak (R1) in the cepstrum is an indicator of hoarse voice quality. The cepstrum is obtained by taking the inverse Fourier Transform of the log-magnitude spectrum. In the present study, a number of spectral analysis processing steps are implemented, including period-synchronous and periodasynchronous analysis, as well as harmonic-synchronous and harmonic-asynchronous spectral band-limitation prior to computing the cepstrum. The analysis is applied to connected speech signals. The correlation between amplitude R1 and perceptual ratings is examined for a corpus comprising 28 normophonic and 223 dysphonic speakers. One observes that the correlation between R1 and perceptual ratings increases when the spectrum is band-limited prior to computing the cepstrum. In addition, comparisons are made with a popular cepstral cue which is the cepstral peak prominence (CPP).