Summary
Objectives
To investigate the impact of standardized mobile phone recordings passed through a
telecom channel on acoustic markers of voice quality and on its perception by voice
experts in normophonic speakers.
Methods
Continuous speech and a sustained vowel were recorded for fourteen female and ten
male normophonic speakers. The recordings were done simultaneously with a head-mounted
high-quality microphone and through the telephone network on a receiving smartphone.
Twenty-two acoustic voice quality, breathiness and pitch-related measures were extracted
from the recordings. Nine vocologists perceptually rated the G, R and B parameters
of the GRBAS scale on each voice sample. The reproducibility, the recording type,
the stimulus type and the gender effects, as well as the correlation between acoustic
and perceptual measures were investigated.
Results
The sustained vowel samples are damped after one second. Only the frequencies between
100 and 3700Hz are passed through the telecom channel and the frequency response is
characterized by peaks and troughs. The acoustic measures show a good reproducibility
over the three repetitions. All measures significantly differ between the recording
types, except for the local jitter, the harmonics-to-noise ratio by Dejonckere and
Lebacq, the period standard deviation and all six pitch measures. The AVQI score is
higher in telephone recordings, while the ABI score is lower. Significant differences
between genders are also found for most of the measures; while the AVQI is similar
in men and women, the ABI is higher in women in both recording types. For the perceptual
assessment, the interrater agreement is rather low, while the reproducibility over
the three repetitions is good. Few significant differences between recording types
are observed, except for lower breathiness ratings on telephone recordings. G ratings
are significantly more severe on the sustained vowel on both recording types, R ratings
only on telephone recordings. While roughness is rated higher in men on telephone
recordings by most experts, no gender effect is observed for breathiness on either
recording types. Finally, neither the AVQI nor the ABI yield strong correlations with
any of the perceptual parameters.
Conclusions
Our results show that passing a voice signal through a telecom channel induces filter
and noise effects that limit the use of common acoustic voice quality measures and
indexes. The AVQI and ABI are both significantly impacted by the recording type. The
most reliable acoustic measures seem to be pitch perturbation (local jitter and period
standard deviation) as well as the harmonics-to-noise ratio from Dejonckere and Lebacq.
Our results also underline that raters are not equally sensitive to the various factors,
including the recording type, the stimulus type and the gender effects. Neither of
the three perceptual parameters G, R and B seem to be reliably measurable on telephone
recordings using the two investigated acoustic indexes. Future studies investigating
the impact of voice quality in telephone conversations should thus focus on acoustic
measures on continuous speech samples that are limited to the frequency response of
the telecom channel and that are not too sensitive to environmental and additive noise.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 30, 2022
Accepted:
August 25,
2022
Publication stage
In Press Corrected ProofFootnotes
This project has received funding from the Commission permanente facultaire à la recherche (CPFR) under the grant number R.CFRA.3906-J-F.
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© 2022 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
