Quantification of breathy voice.
Tatsuya Fukazawa, Iwao Honjo · Practica Oto-Rhino-Laryngologica · 1985
A new method for evaluating breathy voice is reported. It utilizes the difference in frequency distribution pattern between so called jet noises and other slowly changing perturbations of the wave. Because jet noise in the breathy voice changes very rapidly, its second order differentiations sum up to a large number if collected for all the sampled data. This property of the second order differentiation is utilized to construct a breathy hoarseness index. It is defined as the sum of squared second order differentiations of the voice wave normalized by the sum of the wave powers. The index proved to be a useful method of discriminating breathy from rough or normal voices, as well as of quantifying breathyness.