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Perturbation functions and measures: A theoretical study
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Perturbation functions and measures: A theoretical study

Neal B. Pinto and Ingo R. Titze
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.84(S1), pp.S83-S84
11/01/1988
DOI: 10.1121/1.2026515
url
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2026515View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Acoustic analyses of the human voice have been developed to assist in clinical screening of laryngeal pathology. It is hypothesized that perturbation functions derived from parameters measured from the acoustic signal might reflect phonational irregularities due to randomness in the action potentials governing muscle tension, asymmetry in vocal fold geometry, randomness in the air stream from the glottis, interactions between source and tract, and other, as yet unknown, factors. A set of measures computed from these perturbation functions could provide a quantitative description of vocal fold pathology. Unfortunately, many perturbation measures in use today were defined in an ad hoc fashion, with little attention paid to comparatively assessing proposed measures against existing measures. This paper represents an attempt to put the study of voice perturbations on a sounder theoretical footing. Utilizing theories of finite differences and subsampling, algorithms have been developed to aid in discriminating between perturbations based on duration of ocurrence as well as the type of perturbation, i.e., random or periodic. The measures obtained are independent, one reflecting short-term periodic perturbations, another short-term noiselike perturbations, etc. By theoretical and experimental work, we hope eventually to tie these measures in to conditions at the glottis. [Work supported by NIH.]

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