Contributions of acoustic measures to the classification of laryngeal voice quality in continuous English speech

Abstract

Laryngeal voice qualities (e.g. breathy and creaky voice), variable within and across speakers, often pose a challenge in data collection. Their acoustic correlates are still inadequately understood. This study revisits the acoustics of laryngeal voice qualities in high-quality recordings of continuous British English speech produced by experienced phoneticians. Through principal component analysis and multinomial logistic regression with l1 regularisation, this study identifies contributions of a variety of acoustic measures to the classification of laryngeal voice qualities and provides a multidimensional acoustic profile for breathy, creaky, and modal voice. Classification rates as high as 90% were achieved using the first 5 principal components. The most salient acoustic correlates for creaky voice are, compared to other categories, higher mean H2*, lower mean f0 and HNR below 500 Hz, and for breathy voice, higher mean H1* and spectral tilt measures such as H1*–A1* and H1*–H2*.

Publication
Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Prague, Czechia. pp. 1806-1810
Next
Previous

Related