Normative and functional long-term acoustical aspects of English and French men's and women's continuous speech produced normally or with masking noise
William Weiss · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1989
An acoustic measure of voice quality was proposed by Frokjaer-Jensen and Prytz [Tech. Rev. (1976)] as α = intensity above 1 kHz/intensity below 1 kHz. Sundberg and Gauffin, [Q.P.S.R. 2–3, (1978)] seemed to suggest that judging higher spectra as a measure of quality is misleading because it could be obtained with an increased vocal effort. They proposed that a measure of good quality is a higher increase of energy in the F0 area relative to the F 1 area (“flow” phonation). The objective of the investigation was to find out how tension, voice quality, and spectra levels are affected under differential masked (that is, functional) conditions for (1) men and women, (2) anglophones and Francophones. It was found that men have significantly higher F1/F0 than women and that Anglophones have significantly higher α than Francophones under masked conditions. However, in spite of the normative differences, the spectral changes were not significantly different between the groups. These results shall be discussed in view of existing theories of acoustic measurements of voice quality.