Combined Use of Standard and Throat Microphones for Measurement of Acoustic Voice Parameters and Voice Categorization

Virgilijus Uloza; Evaldas Padervinskis; Ingrida Uloziene; Viktoras Saferis; Antanas Verikas

doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2014.10.008

Combined Use of Standard and Throat Microphones for Measurement of Acoustic Voice Parameters and Voice Categorization

J Voice. 2015 Sep;29(5):552-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2014.10.008. Epub 2015 Mar 17.

Authors

Virgilijus Uloza¹, Evaldas Padervinskis², Ingrida Uloziene¹, Viktoras Saferis³, Antanas Verikas⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Otolaryngology, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Kaunas, Lithuania.
² Department of Otolaryngology, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Kaunas, Lithuania. Electronic address: epadervinskis@gmail.com.
³ Department of Physics, Mathematics & Biophysics, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Kaunas, Lithuania.
⁴ Department of Electric Power Systems, Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania; Department of Intelligent Systems, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden.

PMID: 25795349
DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2014.10.008

Abstract

Objective: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the reliability of the measurements of acoustic voice parameters obtained simultaneously using oral and contact (throat) microphones and to investigate utility of combined use of these microphones for voice categorization.

Materials and methods: Voice samples of sustained vowel /a/ obtained from 157 subjects (105 healthy and 52 pathological voices) were recorded in a soundproof booth simultaneously through two microphones: oral AKG Perception 220 microphone (AKG Acoustics, Vienna, Austria) and contact (throat) Triumph PC microphone (Clearer Communications, Inc, Burnaby, Canada) placed on the lamina of thyroid cartilage. Acoustic voice signal data were measured for fundamental frequency, percent of jitter and shimmer, normalized noise energy, signal-to-noise ratio, and harmonic-to-noise ratio using Dr. Speech software (Tiger Electronics, Seattle, WA).

Results: The correlations of acoustic voice parameters in vocal performance were statistically significant and strong (r = 0.71-1.0) for the entire functional measurements obtained for the two microphones. When classifying into healthy-pathological voice classes, the oral-shimmer revealed the correct classification rate (CCR) of 75.2% and the throat-jitter revealed CCR of 70.7%. However, combination of both throat and oral microphones allowed identifying a set of three voice parameters: throat-signal-to-noise ratio, oral-shimmer, and oral-normalized noise energy, which provided the CCR of 80.3%.

Conclusions: The measurements of acoustic voice parameters using a combination of oral and throat microphones showed to be reliable in clinical settings and demonstrated high CCRs when distinguishing the healthy and pathological voice patient groups. Our study validates the suitability of the throat microphone signal for the task of automatic voice analysis for the purpose of voice screening.

Keywords: Acoustic voice parameters; Oral contact microphones; Voice categorization.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Validation Study

MeSH terms

Acoustics / instrumentation*
Adult
Aged
Equipment Design
Female
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Predictive Value of Tests
Reproducibility of Results
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Speech Acoustics*
Speech Production Measurement / instrumentation*
Transducers*
Voice Disorders / diagnosis*
Voice Disorders / physiopathology
Voice Quality*
Young Adult