TOWARDS STANDARDIZING PERCEPTUAL VOICE QUALITY MEASURES

对嗓音质量的判断对患者的 他们的声音的意见，以及临床医生决定启动和 继续治疗。质量判断进一步被用作对 对声音的哪些器乐测量进行了验证。然而，这些 对声音质量的“主观”衡量也不被高度重视 临床或研究工具，因为可靠性和未经测试的问题 有效性。我们假设语音质量测量中的问题不会 源自监听程序，而不是派生自用于 衡量听众听到的内容。拟议的研究与这些背道而驰 通过应用语音合成器来实现传统的评分方法 病理性声音质量研究与可靠性有关的基本问题 以及语音质量测量的有效性。在这种方法中，听众问道 调整合成器参数以实现与原始图像的知觉匹配 声音--通过匹配一个声音来对它进行“评级”。此方法显式链接 声音信号对感知的语音质量的影响。调查人员假设 这种跨语音链的链接提高了有效性、可靠性和 通过提供监听者，声音和知觉表示的效用 用一个客观的工具(合成器)来量化他们听到的东西。这个 拟议的研究重点是扩展和完善我们的合成器 病理语音质量，比较合成的有效性和可靠性 与用于评估语音质量的传统评级等级技术相比， 应用合成器来检查周期的感知重要性， 噪声和浊音源脉冲的形状，并量化不同的 语音质量测量的误差源。调查人员的假设是 这里描述的协议将极大地提高可靠性 和语音质量测量的有效性，使我们更接近我们的目标 制定标准化的语音评估方案。

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.