Classification of voice aging based on the glottal signal

Classification of voice aging has many applications in health care and geriatrics. This work focuses on finding the most relevant parameters to classify voice aging. The most significant parameters extracted from the glottal signal are chosen to identify the voice aging process of men and women. After analyzing their statistics, the chosen parameters are used as entries to a neural network and to a support vector machine set to classify male and female Brazilian speakers in three different age groups: young (from 15 to 30 years old), adult (from 31 to 60 years old), andsenior (from 61 to 90 years old). The corpusused for this work was composed by one hundred and twenty Brazilian speakers (both males and females) of different ages. As compared to similar works, we employ a larger corpus and obtain a superior classification rate. Keywords— Speech processing; voice aging; glottal source; neural network classifier.

[1]  María Victoria Rodellar Biarge,et al.  Glottal Source biometrical signature for voice pathology detection , 2009, Speech Commun..

[2]  Jr. J.P. Campbell,et al.  Speaker recognition: a tutorial , 1997, Proc. IEEE.

[3]  M. Airas METHODS AND STUDIES OF LARYNGEAL VOICE QUALITY ANALYSIS IN SPEECH PRODUCTION , 2008 .

[4]  Mohammad Hossein Sedaaghi,et al.  A Comparative Study of Gender and Age Classification in Speech Signals , 2009 .

[5]  D G Childers,et al.  Vocal quality factors: analysis, synthesis, and perception. , 1991, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  I R Titze,et al.  Vocal intensity in speakers and singers. , 1991, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  M.M. Homayounpour,et al.  Speaker age interval and sex identification based on Jitters, Shimmers and Mean MFCC using supervised and unsupervised discriminative classification methods , 2006, 2006 8th international Conference on Signal Processing.

[8]  P. Alku,et al.  Normalized amplitude quotient for parametrization of the glottal flow. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  I. V. Verdonck‐de Leeuw,et al.  Vocal aging and the impact on daily life: a longitudinal study. , 2004, Journal of voice : official journal of the Voice Foundation.

[10]  Paavo Alku,et al.  Glottal wave analysis with Pitch Synchronous Iterative Adaptive Inverse Filtering , 1991, Speech Commun..

[11]  Hannu Pulakka Analysis of human voice production using inverse filtering, high-speed imaging, and electroglottography , 2005 .

[12]  Ivani Rosa dos Santos Análise acústica da voz de indivíduos na terceira idade , 2005 .

[13]  P. Alku,et al.  Physical variations related to stress and emotional state: A preliminary study. , 1996 .

[14]  M. Vieira Automated measures of dysphonias and the phonatory effects of asymmetries in the posterior larynx , 1997 .

[15]  Paavo Alku,et al.  Amplitude domain quotient for characterization of the glottal volume velocity waveform estimated by inverse filtering , 1996, Speech Commun..

[16]  C. Gobl,et al.  Amplitude-Based Source Parameters for Measur ing Voice Quality , 2003 .