Measurements of jitter and shimmer are frequently employed to quantify laryngeal control and stability during voice production in patients(1-3). Accurate estimates of jitter and shimmer may be obtained from acoustic recordings of sustained vowels produced by patients using computer software implementing algorithms for their extraction (e.g. Praat(4) or MDVP(5)). The jitter and shimmer algorithms do not, in themselves, exclude non-stable productions and are influenced by the inclusion of silence in the analysed intervals. As a consequence, reliable measurements of jitter and shimmer are made by manually opening each sound file and selecting an interval for the computations. The current paper proposes an alternative approach to afford a more efficient estimation of jitter and shimmer across a large set of sustained vowel recordings. Using information readily available in the acoustic signal and a combination of algorithms already available within the Praat program, a reliable method for automatic processing of only the sustained vowel in each recording of a large corpus is outlined. The method further affords the acquisition of multiple, repeatable, measurements of jitter and shimmer for sub-intervals of the vowel’s duration (applying more than one algorithm), which additionally provides information concerning the reliability of the jitter or shimmer estimates for a specific vowel production. Comparisons with manually obtained measurements are made for the purpose of validation of the segmentation method. References 1. Gamboa J, Jiménez-Jiménez FJ, Nieto A, Montojo J, Ortí-Pareja M, Molina JA, et al. Acoustic voice analysis in patients with Parkinson's disease treated with dopaminergic drugs. Journal of Voice. 1997;11(3):314–320. 2. Kent RD, Kim Y-J. Toward an acoustic typology of motor speech disorders. Clin Linguist Phon. 2003;17(6):427–445. 3. Figueiredo ML, de Carvalho APM, Patriani FFA, Suzana BM, Ballalai FH. Acoustic voice assessment in Parkinson's disease patients submitted to posteroventral pallidotomy. Arq. Neuro-Psiquiatr. 2005;63(1):14–19. 4. Boersma P, Weenink D. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program] 5. Kay Elemetrics. Multi-Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP) [Computer program] / <p>Presented at the 14th Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association</p> / En kontrastiv och longitudinell studie gällande effekten av djup hjärnstimulering på Parkinsons-patienters artikulatoriska förmåga. / Intonation and rhythm in speech of patients with Parkinson ́s disease
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-74419 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Karlsson, Fredrik, Doorn, Jan van |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för språkstudier, Umeå universitet, Logopedi, Cork |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Other, info:eu-repo/semantics/other, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0015 seconds