Identifying a creak probability threshold for an irregular pitch period detection algorithm

J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 May;145(5):EL379. doi: 10.1121/1.5100911.

Abstract

Irregular pitch periods (IPPs) are associated with grammatically, pragmatically, and clinically significant types of nonmodal phonation, but are challenging to identify. Automatic detection of IPPs is desirable because accurately hand-identifying IPPs is time-consuming and requires training. The authors evaluated an algorithm developed for creaky voice analysis to automatically identify IPPs in recordings of American English conversational speech. To determine a perceptually relevant threshold probability, frame-by-frame creak probabilities were compared to hand labels, yielding a threshold of approximately 0.02. These results indicate a generally good agreement between hand-labeled IPPs and automatic detection, calling for future work investigating effects of linguistic and prosodic context.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Phonation / physiology*
  • Pitch Perception / physiology*
  • Sound Spectrography / methods
  • Speech / physiology
  • Speech Acoustics
  • Speech Perception / physiology*
  • Voice Quality / physiology*
  • Young Adult