OBJECTIVES To assess the overall efficacy of voice therapy for dysphonia. DESIGN Single blind randomised controlled trial. SETTING Outpatient clinic in a teaching hospital. PARTICIPANTS 204 outpatients aged 17-87 with a primary symptom of persistent hoarseness for at least two months. INTERVENTIONS After baseline assessments, patients were randomised to six weeks of either voice therapy...

This paper presents techniques to improve the quality of voices generated through statistical singing voice conversion with direct waveform modification based on spectrum differential (DIFFSVC). The DIFFSVC method makes it possible to convert singing voice characteristics of a source singer into those of a target singer without using vocoder-based waveform generation. However, quality of the co...

We address interactive voice services over Best E ort packet networks where tra c is subject to unpredictable congestions. The quality of voice services can be signi cantly a ected by network delay and jitter due to the rejection of late packets. LIFO has proven to be an interesting overload strategy in delay constrained systems. We propose the use of the LIFO discipline in the context of conge...

Unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP) is associated with changes in acoustic and aerodynamic voice measurements and can have a significant impact on a patient's quality of life. Few objective data regarding the efficacy of voice therapy for UVFP exist. The aim of this study was to retrospectively analyze voice modifications in a group of patients with UVFP before and after voice therapy. Forty...

PURPOSE To measure the voice-related quality of life in children/adolescents with vocal complaints through the validation of the Brazilian Pediatric Voice-Related Quality-of-Life survey - VR-QOL-P (Qualidade de Vida em Voz Pediátrico - QVV-P), to verify whether the presence of vocal complaints interfere with the quality of life of children/adolescents, and to determine the relationship between ...

. The present study deals with a voice quality that is referred to as “intelligible” or “articulate” voice. The purpose of the present study is to find a relation between the voice quality and acoustic features. The speech material is a read version of a simple short Japanese sentence “a o i so ra” in order to eliminate these linguistic variations. A set of speech samples uttered by fifteen adu...

The present study aims at presenting the instructional material developed in the Brazilian Portuguese context to apply the Voice Profile Analysis Scheme-VPAS (PB-VPAS) for the perceptual evaluation of voice quality and at reporting preliminary data analyzed from a group of nine judges who attended a workshop on VPAS. The adaptation of the VPAS into Brazilian Portuguese was accomplished and the ...

We evaluate the impact of tutor voice quality in the context of our intelligent tutoring spoken dialogue system. We first describe two versions of our system which yielded two corpora of human-computer tutoring dialogues: one using a tutor voice pre-recorded by a human, and the other using a lowcost text-to-speech tutor voice. We then discuss the results of two-tailed t-tests comparing student ...