A well­established difference between male and female voices, at least in an Anglo­Saxon con­ text, is the greater degree of breathy voice used by women. The acoustic measure that has most commonly been used to validate this difference are the relative strengths of the first and second harmonics, H1­H2. This paper suggests that sex­specific differences in harmonic spacing comb...

In this paper, we consider the call admission problem in cellular network with two classes of voice users. In the first part of paper, we introduce a two-threshold guard channel policy and study its limiting behavior under the stationary traffic. Then we give an algorithm for finding the optimal number of guard channels. In the second part of this paper, we give an algorithm, which minimizes th...

Efforts to achieve effective and meaningful patient and public involvement (PPI) in healthcare have existed for nearly a century, albeit with limited success. This brief commentary discusses a recent paper by Carter and Martin exploring the “Challenges Facing Healthwatch, a New Consumer Champion in England,” and places these challenges in the context of the broader struggle to give a voice to h...

PURPOSE The acoustic measure relative fundamental frequency (RFF) was investigated as a potential objective measure to track variations in vocal effort within and across individuals. METHOD Twelve speakers with healthy voices created purposeful modulations in their vocal effort during speech tasks. RFF and an aerodynamic measure of vocal effort, the ratio of sound pressure level to subglottal...

This paper explores the role of voice quality in the communication of emotions, moods and attitudes. Listeners reactions to an utterance synthesised with seven different voice qualities were elicited in terms of pairs of opposing affective attributes. The voice qualities included harsh voice, tense voice, modal voice, breathy voice, whispery voice, creaky voice and lax–creaky voice. These were ...

BACKGROUND Objective acoustic analysis is a key component of multidimensional voice assessment. OperaVOX is an iOS app which has been shown to be comparable to Multi Dimensional Voice Program for most principal measures of vocal function. As a relatively cheap, portable and easily accessible form of acoustic analysis, OperaVOX may be more clinically useful than laboratory-based software in many...

A recent voice recognition experiment conducted by Perrachione, Del Tufo, and Gabrieli (2011) revealed that, in normal adult readers, the accuracy at identifying human voices was better in the participants' mother tongue than in an unfamiliar language, while this difference was absent in a group of adults with dyslexia. This pattern favored a view of dyslexia as due to "fundamentally impoverish...

The paper describes the problem of cepstral speech analysis in the process of automated voice disorder probability estimation. The author proposes to derive two of the most diagnostically significant voice features: quality of harmonic structure and degree of subharmonic from cepstrum of speech signal. Traditionally, these attributes are estimated auricularly or by spectrum (or spectrogram) obs...