Noise measurements of adult men's and women's voices
Susan Nittrouer, Richard S. McGowan, Donna Beehler · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1988
Two algorithms that were designed to detect noise in voiced speech were applied to the middle portion of vowels spoken by men and women in running speech. It was found that the women had as high a signal-to-noise ratio as the men, indicating that the women did not produce more turbulence noise than the men. Also, the ratio of the amplitude of the fundamental to first harmonic (the H1-H2 ratio) was found to be higher for the women than the men. This ratio is a measure of breathiness, which is sensitive to the abruptness of vocal fold closure [C. Bickley, MIT Working Papers, Vol. 1]. The evidence here indicates that turbulence noise is independent of the H1-H2 ratio and the abruptness of fold closure to some degree. The absolute jitter was found to decrease with frequency, corroborating the findings of others. Comparisons for the effect of time of day showed that jitter increased with time of day. [Work supported by NIH grants to Boys Town National Institute and NIH Grants NS-13870, NS-13617, and HD-1994 to Haskins Laboratories.]