• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.13-18
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• 2020

Background and Objective The purpose of this study is to report the effect of voice therapy using the voice reinforcement method (VRM) in patients with vocal nodules. It is one of the holistic voice therapy methods for improving vocal mechanisms. VRM includes not only direct and indirect voice therapy, but also trial therapy and self-practice. Composed of four stages: vocal hygiene education, relaxation, reinforcement, and generalization. Materials and Methods The subjects were 13 patients who were diagnosed with vocal nodules. Acoustic analysis, auditory perceptual assessment, K-VHI-10 and nodules size were compared before and after voice therapy. Voice therapy was conducted by speech-language pathologist and the mean number was 4.2. Results In acoustic analysis, Jitter, vF₀, vAm, Shimmer, NHR, and VTI were significantly decreased. F₀ was increased after voice therapy for women. 'Grade', 'Rough,' and 'Breathy' were significantly decreased in the GRBAS scale after voice therapy. In addition, K-VHI-10 and nodules size were significantly decreased. Conclusion VRM seems to be an effective voice therapy method in vocal nodules treatment. In VRM, especially, trial therapy is given motivation for vocal nodules treatments and self-practice has a continuous therapeutic effect in everyday life. VRM can be also applied to the voice therapy for other hyper-functional dysphonia.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.135-146
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• 2018

The Modified Voiced Lip Trill (MVoLT) training is a variant of voiced lip-till training characterized by increased loudness, lowered laryngeal position, and lip contact facilitated with fingers. The purpose of the current study was to assess the effect of the MVoLT training program on vocal changes of musical singing theater students. A total of 32 musical theater students (17 males and 15 females, age ranging from 18 to 29) participated in the study. For about three months, each participant was tutored using a systematic program focussing on the MVoLT training, accompanied by certain facilitating strategies. Pre- & post-training multi-dimensional vocal characteristics were assesed and compared. Results showed that cepstral peak prominence during vowel phonation increased after training, while its standard deviation and Cepstral Spectral Index of Dysphonia decreased. When an aerodynamic assessment was performed, maximum phonation time, subglottal pressure, mean airflow rate increased, while electroglottographic measures did not change. In addition, decreased psychometric measures, higher maximum pitch, and increased vocal range were noted after training. In conclusion, the MVoLT was proven to have a potential as an effective and safe training method for musical theater singing.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.125-127
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• 2013

Infection by aspergillus, which is a kind of mold, or a filamentous fungus, occurs rarely in larynx. Furthermore, primary laryngeal aspergillosis without any other airway tract extension and without any generalized immune deficit is extremely rare. We present a case of primary aspergillosis on vocal cord in a 72-year-old male who had no history of immune deficiency, voice abuse or steroid use.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.43-52
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• 2005

The common form of pre-emphasis filter is $H(z)\;=\;1\;- az^{-1}$, where a typically lies between 0.9 and 1.0 in voiced signal. Also, this value reflects the degree of filter and equals R(1)/R(0) in Auto-correlation method. This paper proposes a new flattening algorithm to compensate the weaked high frequency components that occur by vocal cord characteristic. We used interval information of LSP to estimate formant frequency. After obtaining the value of slope and inverse slope using linear interpolation among formant frequency, flattening process is followed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm flattened the weaked high frequency components effectively. That is, we could improve the flattened characteristics by using interval information of LSP as flattening factor at the process that compensates weaked high frequency components.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.143-145
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• 2007

Muscle groups that are located in and around the vocal tract can produce audible changes in frequency and/or intensity of the voice. Vocal vibrato is a characteristic feature in the singing of performers trained in the western classical tradition and vibrato is generally considered to result from modulation in frequency amplitude and timbre. Vocal tremor is also characterized by periodic fluctuations in the voice frequency or intensity and vocal tremor is symptom of a neurological disease as Spasmodic dysphonia , Parkinson's disease. Vocal vibrato and Vocal tremor may have many of the same origins and mechanisms in the voice production systems. The purpose of this study is to find acostic character of Korean traditional song Pansori singer's vibrato and Spasmodic dysphonia patient's vocal tremor. twelve Pansori singers and seven Spasmodic dysponia patients participated to this study. Power spectrum and Real time Spectrogram are used to analyze the acoustic characteristics of Pansori singing and Spasmodic dysphonia patient's voice The results are as follows; First, vowel formant differences between Pansori singing and Spasmodic dysphonia patient's voice are higher F1, F3. Second, The vibrato rate show differences between Pansori singing and Spasmodic dysphonia patients;$4^{\sim}6/sec$ and $5{\sim}6/sec$ Vibrato rate of pitch is 5.7 Hz ${\sim}$ 42.4 Hz for Pansori singing , 3.8 Hz ${\sim}$ 27.9 Hz for Spasmodic dysphonia patients ;Vibrato rate of intensity range is 0.07 dB ${\sim}$ 8.26 dB for Pansori singing and 0.07 dB ${\sim}$ 4.81 dB for Spasmodic dysphonia patients

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1997 no.05
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• pp.313-315
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• 1997

We developed a new analysis technique for the assessment of irregular vibratory movement of vocal folds. Successive frames of pre-recorded video images from videostroboscopy were transferred to computer memory and a vibratory tract of one selected point was described as a waveform by displaying the same lines of all frames along the y-direction. By applying this technique, irregular vibratory patterns of multiple regions, such as asynchronized registration of glottal cycles, could be easily visualized. It would be possible to monitor and analyze the pathologic changes of vocal fold movement by means of this newly developed system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.53-58
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• 2023

After thyroidectomy, some patients who show normal vocal cord movement still complain of subjective voice problems, which could lead to a decrease in quality of life related to communication. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a newly designed voice therapy applying neck exercise and semi-occluded vocal tract exercise (SOVTE) to improve voice problems after thyroidectomy without neurological injury. For this purpose, voice therapy was randomly assigned to 10 women who received thyroidectomy. Acoustic analysis [fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, noise-to-harmonics ratio, min Voice Range Profile (VRP), max VRP, VRP] was performed before and after surgery and immediately after voice therapy to compare voice changes. The study showed a statistically significant increase in max VRP and VRP after voice therapy compared to before surgery. These results suggest that the voice therapy methods in this study effectively improve a major symptom of voice problems after thyroidectomy, specifically the reduction in the high-frequency range. However, this study was limited in the number of s participants and did not control for the type of surgery. Therefore, further research utilizing larger sample sizes and controlled variables is needed to investigate the long-term effects of voice therapy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.57-64
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• 2018

The purpose of the present study was to explore the radiological and acoustic characteristics of "Arae-a" (/${\cdot}$/) articulation in two male Jeju language speakers, focusing on selected measures in radiological images derived from computed tomography scans, as well as the first and the second formant measures in selected vowels. An elderly male speaker (a 78-year-old) and a young male speaker (a 34-year-old) participated in the study. During the production of four selected vowels, the shape of the vocal tract was identified, and selected measures were obtained from the elderly participant's computed tomography (CT) scans. For acoustic analysis, the participants were given a list of near-minimal pairs consisting of 112 words and asked to read them aloud. The results indicated that the "Arae-a" (/${\cdot}$/) articulation of the elderly speaker showed unique acoustic and radiological characteristics compared to other similar vowels, thus presenting substantial consistency with the descriptions of the "Hunminjeongeum Haeryebon." In contrast, the F1 and F2 measures of the young male's /${\cdot}$/ articulation were not distinguished from those of /ㅗ/. Current results, in part, support the scientific principles underlying the invention of "Arae-a," which reflects the shape of the vocal tract during production, and the necessity for further research.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2013

This paper proposes a new feature extraction algorithm to improve children's speech recognition in Korean. The proposed feature extraction algorithm combines three methods. The first method is on the vocal tract length normalization to compensate acoustic features because the vocal tract length in children is shorter than in adults. The second method is to use the uniform bandwidth because children's voice is centered on high spectral regions. Finally, the proposed algorithm uses a smoothing filter for a robust speech recognizer in real environments. This paper shows the new feature extraction algorithm improves the children's speech recognition performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.15-23
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• 2001

This paper presents a voice conversion technique that modifies the utterance of a source speaker as if it were spoken by a target speaker. Feature parameter conversion methods to perform the transformation of vocal tract and prosodic characteristics between the source and target speakers are described. The transformation of vocal tract characteristics is achieved by modifying the LPC cepstral coefficients using Linear Multivariate Regression (LMR). Prosodic transformation is done by changing the average pitch period between speakers, and it is applied to the residual signal using the LP-PSOLA scheme. Experimental results show that transformed speech by LMR and LP-PSOLA synthesis method contains much characteristics of the target speaker.