• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.45-51
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• 2023

Voice issues such as voice weakness that arise with age can have social and emotional impacts, potentially leading to feelings of isolation and depression. This study aimed to investigate the changes in acoustic characteristics resulting from aging, focusing on voice quality and spoken fluency. To this end, tasks involving sustained vowel phonation and paragraph reading were recorded for 20 elderly and 20 young participants. Voice-quality-related variables, including F0, jitter, shimmer, and Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) values, were analyzed along with speech-fluency-related variables, such as average syllable duration (ASD), articulation rate (AR), and speech rate (SR). The results showed that in voice quality-related measurements, F0 was higher for the elderly and voice quality was diminished, as indicated by increased jitter, shimmer, and lower CPP levels. Speech fluency analysis also demonstrated that the elderly spoke more slowly, as indicated by all ASD, AR, and SR measurements. Correlation analysis between voice quality and speech fluency showed a significant relationship between shimmer and CPP values and between ASD and SR values. This suggests that changes in spoken fluency can be identified early by measuring the variations in voice quality. This study further highlights the reciprocal relationship between voice quality and spoken fluency, emphasizing that deterioration in one can affect the other.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.73-84
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to explore the acoustic characteristics of sexy voice. In this study, we measured acoustic parameters (fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and nasalance) of a sustained vowel sound produced by 40 actors (20 males and 20 females) and 40 non-actors (20 males and 20 females). Digital audio recordings were made in the sustained vowel |a| for acoustic analyses using Praat (version 4.1.9) and Nasal View (version 4.5). Twenty voice pathologists participated in the listening experiment and judged the degree of sexiness on a 7-point scale. The results showed that fundamental frequency, shimmer and nasalance had significant differences between actors and non-actors. The acoustic parameters of sexy voice matched perceptual aspects of a previous study: Low fundamental frequency-low pitch and high shimmer-husky voice. On the other hand, the nasalance score did not match that of the previous study: Decreased nasalance had a higher score on sexiness scale judged by the listeners. It would be desirable to study the voice quality by analyzing and controlling more acoustic and auditory parameters for practical applications in the future.

• Journal of Oriental Neuropsychiatry
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.155-162
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• 2013

Objectives : The purpose of this study is to evaluate the voice handicaps of the idiopathic Parkinson's Diseases (PD) and their voice-related quality of life. Methods : Voice handicap index-10 (VHI-10) and Voice related Quality of Life were completed by 17 idiopathic PD patients, and Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) part I, II, III were assessed. The relations between VHI-10, VRQOL and UPDRS scores were analysed. Results : VHI-10 score of PD patients was $14.35{\pm}8.07$ and VRQOL total score of PD patients was $59.12{\pm}20.25$, social-emotional $59.93{\pm}20.50$, physical function $58.58{\pm}21.77$. There were significant relations between VHI-10, VRQOL score and UPDRS II (activities of daily living). Conclusions : These results suggest that voice impairments affect the daily living of PD patients and their quality of lives.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartC
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• v.19C no.2
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• pp.119-126
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• 2012

This paper covers the service quality of packet-based voice service that is provided over wireless broadband (WiBro) and high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) systems. Using a measurement software that has been developed in the course of preparing a advanced service quality management scheme for the packet-based voice service over wireless networks, a huge scale of experiment is conducted to measure the real quality of the voice service. Based on our analysis of the measurement results, the service quality of the voice service is supposed to be quite good over both wireless systems. In addition, another experiment to investigate the effect of degradation of wireless transmission conditions on the service quality of the voice service shows the values of wireless service metrics in which mean opinion score (MOS) starts to decrease.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.32-37
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• 1998

Tonsillectomy is the one of operation that is performed the most commonly in otolaryngology field. Many changes that include range of voice, tone, voice quality and resonance were made by tonsillectomy. Sometimes, any patients taken tonsillectomy has suffer from these voice problem after tonsillectomy. However there are less study for these problems until now. Then, we studied to find the anatomical findings that affected the voice quality when tonsillectomy was performed. We evaluated the voice in 2 groups, one is the group showed the normal pharyngeal space by using the transnasal fiberscopy, the other is group showed medially bulging tonsil at pharyngeal cavity by using same method, with perceptual evaluation, nasalance score, nasality, oral formant and nasal formant. We used the computerized speech analysis system, the nasometer and the spectrogram in the CSL program. We could not find any differences in perceptual evaluation between two groups. But objective measures were provided. Nasalance score and nasality on the nasometric analysis were increased significantly and oral formant on the spectrogram was changed singnificantly after tonsillectomy in Group 2. Authors thought medially bulging tonsil in the pharynx is able to affect the voice quality after tonsillectomy when we evaluted through the nasal cavity by the using of fiberscopy and this evaluation would be important especially in singers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.103-108
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the Bel canto singing technique on voice quality in patients with vocal bowing and sulcus vocalis. Five patients with vocal bowing, and five patients with sulcus vocalis participated in the study. Each subject was assessed acoustically (Jitter, Shimmer, NNE) in the first and last session. Dr. Speech (version 4.0, Tiger-DRS) was used to compare acoustic parameters of pre- and post-treatment. The Bel canto singing technique consisted of breathing exercises, relaxation exercises, and phonation exercises. The results showed that the Bel canto singing technique tended to be effective on improving voice quality in patients with organic voice disorders.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.129-136
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• 2017

This study investigates the effect of voice quality on speech intelligibility and the relationship between voice quality and intelligibility for children with spastic CP. We recruited 36 children with spastic CP (mean age 10.43 year, 17 girls, 19 boys, spastic type 34, mixed 2) from a special school and a rehabilitation hospital. Voice samples for the perceptual analysis of voice quality were extracted from a sustained vowel /a/ and were rated on the GRBAS scales by two experienced speech language pathologists. Ten adult subjects with no hearing problems evaluated speech intelligibility for the 37 words listed in the Assessment of Phonology and Articulation for Children on a 7-point interval scale. The children with spastic CP were divided into three groups according to the rated G scores on the GRBAS scales (G1(n)=10, G2(n)=13, G3(n)=13). Analyses of ANCOVA and Pearson correlation showed that there was a significant difference in speech intelligibility among three groups. There was also a significant correlation in G scale (grade), A scale (asthenia), B scale (breathy) score, and speech intelligibility. These findings suggest that poor speech intelligibility of spastic CP might be related to asthenia and breathiness. Vocal intensity should be increased and vocal functioning should be improved for speech therapy to improve speech intelligibility of the children with spastic CP.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.512-517
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• 2018

Improving voice quality is a major concern in telecommunications. In this paper, we propose a robust speech quality enhancement against background noise and packet loss at VoIP (Voice-over-IP) receiver. The proposed method combines network jitter estimation based on hybrid Markov chain, adaptive playout scheduling using the estimated jitter, and speech enhancement based on restoration of amplitude and phase to enhance the quality of the speech signal arriving at the VoIP receiver over IP network. The experimental results show that the proposed method removes the background noise added to the speech signal before encoding at the sender side and provides the enhanced speech quality in an unstable network environment.

• Journal of Software Assessment and Valuation
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.73-83
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• 2019

Voice Recognition has recently been improved with AI(Artificial Intelligence) and has greatly improved the false recognition rate and provides an effective and efficient Human Machine Interface (HMI). This trend has also been applied in the defense industry, particularly in the aviation, F-35. However, for the quality evaluation of Voice Recognition, the defense industry, especially the aircraft, requires measurable quantitative models. In this paper, the quantitative evaluation model is proposed for applying Voice Recognition to aircraft. For the proposal, the evaluation items are identified from the Voice Recognition technology and ISO/IEC 25000(SQuaRE) quality attributes. Using these two perspectives, the quantitative evaluation model is proposed under aircraft operation condition and confirms the evaluation results.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.962-977
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• 2019

The human voice is a convenient method of information transfer between different objects such as between men, men and machine, between machines. The development of information and communication technology, the voice has been able to transfer farther than before. The way to communicate, it is to convert the voice to another form, transmit it, and then reconvert it back to sound. In such a communication process, a vocoder is a method of converting and re-converting a voice and sound. The CELP (Code-Excited Linear Prediction) type vocoder, one of the voice codecs, is adapted as a standard codec since it provides high quality sound even though its transmission speed is relatively low. The EVRC (Enhanced Variable Rate CODEC) and QCELP (Qualcomm Code-Excited Linear Prediction), variable bit rate vocoders, are used for mobile phones in 3G environment. For the real-time implementation of a vocoder, the reduction of sound quality is a typical problem. To improve the sound quality, that is important to know the size and shape of noise. In the existing sound quality improvement method, the voice activated is detected or used, or statistical methods are used by the large mount of data. However, there is a disadvantage in that no noise can be detected, when there is a continuous signal or when a change in noise is large.This paper focused on finding a better way to decrease the reduction of sound quality in lower bit transmission environments. Based on simulation results, this study proposed a preprocessor application that estimates the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) using the spectral SNR estimation method. The SNR estimation method adopted the IMBE (Improved Multi-Band Excitation) instead of using the SNR, which is a continuous speech signal. Finally, this application improves the quality of the vocoder by enhancing sound quality adaptively.