Summary
Introduction
The purpose of the study was to assess acoustic measures of fundamental frequency
(fo), standard deviation of fo (SD of fo), jitter%, shimmer%, noise-to-harmonic ratio (NHR), smoothed cepstral peak prominence
(CPPS), and acoustic voice quality index analyzed through multiple Praat versions
automatically by VoiceEvalU8 or manually by two raters. In addition, default settings
to calculate CPPS in two Praat versions manually analyzed by two raters were compared
to Maryn and Weenik
20
procedures for CPPS automatically analyzed by VoiceEvalU8.Methods
Nineteen vocally healthy females used VoiceEvalU8 to record three 5-s sustained /a/
trials, the all voiced phrase “we were away a year ago,” and a 15-s speech sample
twice a day for five consecutive days. Two raters manually completed acoustic analysis
using different versions of Praat and compared that analysis to measures automatically
generated through a version of Praat used by VoiceEvalU8. One-way analyses of variance
were run for all acoustic measures with post-hoc testing by the Bonferroni method.
For acoustic measures that demonstrated significant differences, intraclass correlation
coefficients were conducted.
Results
Results showed no significant differences across automatic and manual analysis for
different versions of Praat for all acoustic measures during /a/, for fo, jitter%, shimmer%, and NHR during the phrase, for jitter%, shimmer%, NHR, and CPPS
during speech, and for acoustic voice quality index calculated from both sustained
/a/ and the phrase. The default Praat settings for CPPS were not significantly different
from the Maryn and Weenik
20
procedures for sustained /a/ and speech. Significant differences were present for
SD of fo and CPPS during the phrase and fo and SD of fo during speech. SD of fo and CPPS in the phrase were moderately correlated and fo and SD of fo during speech demonstrated good to excellent correlations across the different versions
of Praat.Conclusions
Acoustic measures analyzed through sustained /a/ and some of the acoustic measures
during the phrase and speech were not different across multiple versions of Praat.
Automatic analysis by VoiceEvalU8 produced similar mean values as compared to manual
analysis by two raters. Even though SD of fo and CPPS in the phrase and fo and SD of fo in speech were different across the versions of Praat, the measures demonstrated
moderate to excellent reliability.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: December 28, 2020
Accepted:
December 4,
2020
Footnotes
Jeremy Wolfberg received the Elizabeth Grillo Education and Travel Fund Award in November 2019 for presenting the work described in this manuscript at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in Orlando, FL.
Elizabeth Grillo has the following financial disclosures: salary and benefit support from West Chester University as an employee, royalties from Northern Speech Services for online continuing education courses, grant support from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) R15DC014566 and the National Loan Repayment Program, and subscription fees from VoiceEvalU8, LLC.
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
