Acoustic correlates of dysphonia: type and severity.

The purpose of this study was to explore the acoustic discrimination and graded severity of three clinical voice types. Listeners classified 102 samples of dysphonic vowels /a/ and /i/ on the basis of voice types: breathy, hoarse, and strained. The vowels were analyzed acoustically with two measures of perturbation and 2 measures of spectral noise. Discriminant analysis showed that apriori, acoustic classifications of voice type were made with 92% accuracy using four acoustic parameters: (a) cepstral peak prominence (CPP), (b) jitter standard deviation (SD-J), (c) fundamental frequency (F0), and (d) standard deviation of signal-to-noise ratio (SD-SNR). Findings suggest that voice type is associated with the interaction of spectral noise, fundamental frequency, and signal irregularity, and that dysphonic severity is associated with similar parameters, regardless of voice type.