Study on vocal aging from acoustical, physiological and perceptual viewpoints

采用横断面和纵向研究的方法，研究了选定的声源参数：基频（F0）、抖动、闪烁、声门噪声能量等与年龄相关的变化。在纵向研究中，对20名没有喉部疾病的男性和38名女性的日语元音/a/持续发声进行了声学分析，记录时间从10年到18年不等。统计分析表明：1)声学参数的纵向变化具有很强的个性；2)F0的下降是女性比男性更具有代表性的声音老化趋势，而F0的上升在男性中没有发现，3)闪烁是声音老化的更明显的迹象，而不是抖动；4)高频区域的声门噪声随着年龄的增长而增加。基于133名男性和129名女性的横断面研究显示，声学参数的年龄相关趋势相似。另一方面，基于合成句子语音样本的感知研究表明，与平均F0、抖动和闪烁相比，音高范围、说话速率和频谱倾斜是对说话者年龄感知的更显著参数。

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.