Disordered voice measurement and auditory analysis

Although voice disorder is ordinarily first detected by listening, hearing is little used in voice measurement. Auditory critical band approaches to the quantitative analysis of dysphonia are compared with the results of applying cycle-by-cycle time based methods and the results from a listening test. The comparisons show that quite large rough/smooth differences, that are readily perceptible, are not as robustly measurable using either peripheral human hearing based GammaTone spectrograms, or a cepstral prominence algorithm, as they may be when using cycle-by-cycle based computations that are linked to temporal criteria. The implications of these tentative observations are discussed for the development of clinically relevant analyses of pathological voice signals with special reference to the analytic advantages of employing appropriate auditory criteria.

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