• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.169-189
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• 2003

Trained singers, one group of professional voice users, have much more interest on the voice than common people, and on its management, too. They train for singing beautiful songs, and, at the same time, try for efficient voice production. The present study was performed with three tenors and three baritones, undergraduate students majored in classical singing, to investigate the degree of improvement of their voice production efficiency through vocal function exercise, by measuring the three dependent variables, maximum phonation time, speed quotient of glottal contact, and the number of semi tones. For the baseline establishment, dependent variables were measured 3$\sim$6 times for two weeks. Then, the subjects exercised vocal function exercise for seven weeks, and after the termination of training, evaluation was performed four times for two weeks, to find the maintenance of the training effect. Vocal function exercise is composed of four successive steps: warm-up, stretching exercise, contracting exercise, power exercise. As results, all of six subjects showed improvement in the aspect of maximum phonation time, speed quotient if glottal contact, and the number of semitones.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.159-162
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• 2005

Identification is the process automatically identify who is speaking on the basis of information obtained from speech waves. In training phase, each speaker models are trained using each speaker's speech data. GMMs (Gaussian Mixture Models), which have been successfully applied to speaker modeling in text-independent speaker identification, are not efficient in insufficient training data environment. This paper proposes speaker modeling method using MLLR (Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression) method which is used for speaker adaptation in speech recognition. We make SD-like model using MLLR adaptation method instead of speaker dependent model (SD). Proposed system outperforms the GMMs in small training data environment.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.135-139
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• 1999

Objectives : The purpose of this study was to systematically analyze and compare the acoustic characteristics of vocal major students with vocal nodule when singing. Materials and Methods : Ten sopranos with vocal nodule, who have never been treated due to voice problems, were the subject group. Twenty healthy sopranos major students were the control group for this study. The vocal nodule was confirmed by stroboscopy and the acoustic and electroglottographic analysis was conducted on be groups. Additionally, an inquiry on usual voice problems during speaking and singing were performed on each of the groups. Results : The vowel /a/ was spoken and sung by sopranos of each group. There were no significant differences in Fo, jitter, shimmer, NHR at speaking and singing in either group. We did not register any significant differences of closed quotient and speed quotient in electroglottography for both groups at singing, but speed quotient was increased in subject group at speaking(p＜0.05). And the sopranos with nodule demonstrated voice fatigue(70%), strained and tired voice after long period of performance and conversation(60%) on inquiry. Conclusions : Although they had a vocal nodule, this group, who had a long period of voice training, did not present any differences in acoustic and electroglottographic problems during short performance, but, the vocalists noticed delicate voice problems after a long performance. We conclude that the voice training teacher and laryngologist must initiate voice management and speech therapy for vocal nodule, even if there is no specific abnormality in acoustic analysis.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 2004.04a
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• pp.515-518
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• 2004

This paper presents a method that improves the performance of the personal voice dialling system in which speaker Independent phoneme HMM's are used. Since the speaker independent phoneme HMM based voice dialing system uses only the phone transcription of the input sentence, the storage space could be reduced greatly. However, the performance of the system is worse than that of the system which uses the speaker dependent models due to the phone recognition errors generated when the speaker Independent models are used. In order to solve this problem, a new method that jointly estimates transformation vectors for the speaker adaptation and transcriptions from training utterances is presented. The biases and transcriptions are estimated iteratively from the training data of each user with maximum likelihood approach to the stochastic matching using speaker-independent phone models. Experimental result shows that the proposed method is superior to the conventional method which used transcriptions only.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.117-121
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• 2010

The This study aimed to evaluate the effects of the voice therapy we operated to the patients with age-related dysphonia. Thirty four participants who were diagnosed as age-related dysphonia in laryngoscopic finding from January, 2009 to December, 2009 completed the study. The participants were aged from 60 to 82 years old with a mean age of 70.6. All participants had received the abdominal breath technique, SKHPIP with laughter, and basic vocal training with description of their problem, the length of which ranged from four sessions to twelve sessions. We executed the videostroboscopy to compare the aspect of voicing change and the perceptual assessment, voice range profile, acoustic and aerodynamic measures to identify change of voice. Participants had glottal gap due to incomplete glottic closure during voicing on the pretest. After they took the voice therapy, the glottic gap became narrow and rough and breathy voice was reduced. There were significant difference in acoustic and aerodynamic measures. Jitter, Shimmer, MFR were reduced and MPT, Psub were increased(p<.05). Participants' pitch range and intensity range were increased on the posttest performance after taking voice therapy. Especially, most of them were showed that pitch range was increased significantly in high frequency area. The results of this investigation indicate that the voice therapy using abdominal breath, SKHPIP, and exercise together is effective for the patients who have age-related dysphonia to improve their voice quality. We recommend to apply this technique to functional voice disorders who are showed glottal gap.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.194-198
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• 2007

In this paper, we apply a discriminative weight training to a statistical model-based voice activity detection(VAD). In our approach, the VAD decision rule is expressed as the geometric mean of optimally weighted likelihood ratios(LRs) based on a minimum classification error(MCE) method which is different from the previous works in that different weights are assigned to each frequency bin which is considered more realistic. According to the experimental results, the proposed approach is found to be effective for the statistical model-based VAD using the LR test.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.179-184
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• 2013

A voice recognition technology as a technology fundament plays an important role in medical devices with smart functions. This paper describes the implementation of a control system that can be utilized as a part of illumination equipment for medical applications (IEMA) based on a voice recognition. The control system can essentially be divided into five parts, the microphone, training part, recognition part, memory part, and control part. The system was implemented using the RSC-4x evaluation board which is included the micro-controller for voice recognition. To investigate the usefulness of the implemented control system, the experiments of the recognition rate was carried out according to the input distance for voice recognition. As a result, the recognition rate of the control system was more than 95% within a distance between 0.5 and 2m. The result verified that the implemented control system performs well as the smart control system based for an IEMA.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.75-80
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• 2021

Background and Objectives Functional aphonia refers to in which by presenting whispering voice and almost producing very high-pitched tensed voices are produced. Voice therapy is the most effective treatment, but there is a lack of consensus for application of voice therapy. The purpose of this study was to examine the vocal characteristics of functional aphonia and the effect of voice therapy applied accordingly. Materials and Method From October 2019 to December 2020, 11 patients with functional aphonia were treated using voice therapy which was processing three stages such as vocal hygiene, trial therapy, and behavioral therapy. Of these, 7 patients who completed the voice evaluation before and after voice therapy was enrolled in this study. By retrospective chart review, clinical information such as sex, age, symptoms, duration, social and medical history, process of voice therapy, subjective and objective findings were analyzed. Voice parameters before and after voice therapy were compared. Results In GRBAS study, grade, rough, and asthenic, and in Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice, overall severity, roughness, pitch, and loudness were significantly improved after voice therapy. In Voice handicap index, all of the scores of total and sub-categories were significantly decreased. In objective voice analysis, jitter, cepstral peak prominence, and maximum phonation time were significantly improved. Conclusion The voice therapy was effective for the treatment of functional aphonia by restoring patient's vocalization and improving voice quality, pitch and loudness.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.8
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• pp.443-449
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• 2008

One of the key issues in practical speech processing is to achieve robust Voice Activity Deteciton (VAD) against the background noise. Most of the statistical model-based approaches have tried to employ equally weighted likelihood ratios (LRs), which, however, deviates from the real observation. Furthermore voice activities in the adjacent frames have strong correlation. In other words, the current frame is highly correlated with previous frame. In this paper, we propose the effective VAD approach based on a minimum classification error (MCE) method which is different from the previous works in that different weights are assigned to both the likelihood ratio on the current frame and the decision statistics of the previous frame.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.25-33
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• 2015

Background and Objectives:The objective of this study was to investigate the features of post-thyroidectomy subjective voice disorder by Voice Handicap Index (VHI) and Voice Symptom Scale (VOISS) through aerodynamic analysis and to investigate the appropriate voice therapy intervention. Materials and Methods:Twenty post-thyroidectomy patients who had no recurrent laryngeal nerve paralysis through laryngeal stroboscopy were enrolled for this study. Acoustic and aerodynamic evaluations were performed before operation, 2 weeks and 3 months after operation. Subjective voice evaluation was performed by VHI and VOISS. Aerodynamic evaluation was compared and analysed by maximum phonation time(MPT), phonation threshold pressure(PTP), mean air flow rate(MFR), etc. Subjective voice evaluation was surveyed through VHI and VOISS. To evaluate patients' symptoms related to functional voice disorder, scores on physical domain in VHI and VOISS were selected to be compared for each session. Results: The 10 out of 20 participants who complained of voice symptoms had no significant difference with pre-operation in acoustic evaluation, but all showed higher scores on 2 weeks and 3 months after operation compared to pre-operation, in VHI-physical domain and selected questionnaires in VOISS. They reduced MPT and increased PTP value simultaneously. Laryngeal massage and breathing training were simultaneously treated to them, 5 participants resulting in improvement in MPT and PTP compared to pre-treatment. Conclusion:Patients who complained voice change with no organic damage after thyroidectomy were all shown to have reduced MPT and increased PTP in some by aerodynamic evaluations. Reduced MPT may imply some problem in air flow beneath glottis. Increased PTP suggests much more effort in vocalization mechanism than pre-operation. Comparing aerodynamic evaluations in post-thyroidectomy may provide information on behavioral interventions. Additionally, study on laryngeal massage and breathing training simultaneously treated to patients with such voice disorder is needed to be conducted with larger number of participants.