Study on vocal aging from acoustical, physiological and perceptual viewpoints

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Cross-sectional and longitudinal study was performed to investigate age-related changes of selected voice source parameters : fundamental frequency (F0), jitter, shimmer, glottal noise energy, and so on. In the longitudinal study, acoustic analyses were made on the sustained phonation of the Japanese vowel /a/ of 20 males and 38 females with no laryngeal disease, which were recorded over periods ranging from 10 to 18 years. The statistical analyses revealed that : 1) strong individuality existed for significant longitudinal changes in the acoustic parameters, 2) F0 falling is a more emblematic tendency of vocal aging of females than males, while F0 rising, which has been pointed out in the previous reports for males, was not found, 3) shimmer is a more observable indication of vocal aging than jitter, and 4) glottal noise in a high-frequency region tends to increase with aging. The cross sectional study based on 133 males and 129 females showed a similar age-related tendency of the acoustic parameters. Perceptual study based on synthetic sentence speech samples, on the other hand, showed that pitch range, speaking rate and spectral tilt are more salient parameters for the perception of speaker's age than average F0, jitter and shimmer.