Selection and combination of acoustic features for the description of pathologic voices

Abstract

The glottal to noise excitation ratio (GNE) is an acoustic measure designed to assess the amount of noise in a pulse train generated by the oscillation of the vocal folds. So far its properties have only been studied for synthesized signals, where it was found to be independent of variations of fundamental frequency (jitter) and amplitude (shimmer). On the other hand, other features designed for the same purpose like NNE (normalized noise energy) or CHNR (cepstrum based harmonics-to-noise ratio) did not show this independence. This advantage of the GNE over NNE and CHNR, as well as its general applicability in voice quality assessment, is now tested for real speech using a large group of pathologic voices (n = 447). A set of four acoustic features is extracted from a total of 22 mostly well-known acoustic voice quality measures by correlation analysis, mutual information analysis, and principal components analysis. Three of these measures are chosen to assess primarily different aspects of signal aperiodicity, while the fourth one indicates the noise content of the signal. All analysis methods lead to the same feature set that consists of a measure of period correlation, jitter, shimmer, and GNE. The two-dimensional projection of this set named "hoarseness diagram" allows a graphical illustration of voice quality that can be easily interpreted.