TOWARDS STANDARDIZING PERCEPTUAL VOICE QUALITY MEASURES

对语音质量的判断对患者的健康有很大的影响。 他们的声音的意见，也对临床医生的决定， 继续治疗。质量判断进一步被用作标准， 哪些声音的仪器测量是有效的。但这些 语音质量的“主观”测量也不被高度重视。 临床或研究工具，由于可靠性和未经测试的问题 效度我们假设语音质量测量中的问题不 它起源于侦听器，而是从用于 衡量听众听到的内容。拟议的研究偏离这些 通过应用语音合成器， 病态语音质量研究有关可靠性的基本问题 和语音质量测量的有效性。在这种方法中，听众会问 调整合成器参数以实现与原始合成器的感知匹配 voice --通过匹配语音来对其进行“评级”。此方法显式地将 声音信号到感知的语音质量。研究人员假设， 这种跨言语链的联系提高了有效性、可靠性和 声学和感知表示的效用，通过为听众提供 用一个客观的工具（合成器）来量化他们所听到的。的 拟议的研究重点是扩大和完善我们的合成器， 病理嗓音质量，比较合成的效度和信度 技术与用于评估语音质量的传统评级标度技术相比， 应用合成器来检查周期性的感知重要性， 噪声和声源脉冲的形状，并量化不同的 语音质量测量中的误差来源。研究人员假设 这里描述的协议将大大提高可靠性， 语音质量测量的有效性，使我们更接近我们的目标 开发一个标准化的语音评估协议。

Judgments of voice quality contribute greatly to patients' opinions of their voice, and also to a clinician's decision to initiate and continue treatment. Quality judgments are further used as a standard against which instrumental measures of voice are validated. Nevertheless, these "subjective" measures of voice quality are not highly regarded as either clinical or research tools, because of problems with reliability and untested validity. We hypothesize that problems in voice quality measurement do not originate within the listener, but rather derive from the methods used to measure what listeners hear. The proposed research departs from these traditional rating scale methods by applying a speech synthesizer for pathological voice quality to study fundamental issues concerning reliability and validity of measures of voice quality. In this approach, listeners an asked to adjust synthesizer parameters to achieve a perceptual match to the original voice -- to "rate" a voice by matching it. This method explicitly links the acoustic signal to perceived voice quality. The investigators hypothesize that this linkage across the speech chain increases the validity, reliability, and utility of both acoustic and perceptual representations, by providing listeners with an objective tool (a synthesizer) for quantifying what they hear. The proposed research focuses on expanding and refining our synthesizer for pathological voice quality, compares the validity and reliability of synthesis techniques to traditional rating scale techniques for evaluating voice quality, applies the synthesizer to examine the perceptual importance of a periodicity, noise and the shape of the voicing source pulse, and quantifies the different sources of error in voice quality measurement. The investigators hypothesize that the protocols described here will greatly increase both the reliability and validity of voice quality measurement, bringing us much closer to our goal to develop a standardized voice evaluation protocol.