Automatic Modeling of Acoustic Perception of Breathiness in Pathological Voices

This paper revisits the modeling of acoustic perceptions of breathy voice (BV) quality for automatic assessment of perturbations in pathologic speech. Several acoustic measures related with the signal periodicity, harmonic components, and aspiration noise are studied to predict breathiness judgments performed on sustained vowel phonations. A novel comprehensive automatic measure is proposed that provides the highest correlation index (88.5%) with breathiness judgment performed by trained specialists on simulated and recorded utterances. The new measure reveals the most relevant aspects of BV quality and provides a vehicle to obtain reliable objectives judgments of such speech perturbation.