Cepstral peak prominence: A comprehensive analysis

• An insight into the meaning of cepstral peak prominence (CPP) is provided.
• The impact of signal windowing and sampling on the cepstral peak amplitude are studied.
• The relation between CPP and perturbation parameters is proven.

An analytical study of cepstral peak prominence (CPP) is presented, intended to provide an insight into its meaning and relation with voice perturbation parameters. To carry out this analysis, a parametric approach is adopted in which voice production is modelled using the traditional source-filter model and the first cepstral peak is assumed to have Gaussian shape. It is concluded that the meaning of CPP is very similar to that of the first rahmonic and some insights are provided on its dependence with fundamental frequency and vocal tract resonances. It is further shown that CPP integrates measures of voice waveform and periodicity perturbations, be them either amplitude, frequency or noise.