Software for the Analysis and Synthesis of Pathological Voice Quality

Description

Voice quality is an important topic of study in many disciplines, but knowledge of its nature is limited by a poor understanding of the relevant psychoacoustics. The documentation below describes software for voice analysis and synthesis designed to test hypotheses about the relationship between acoustic parameters and voice quality perception. The formant synthesizer provides experimenters with a useful tool for creating and modeling voice signals. In particular, it offers an integrated approach to voice analysis and synthesis and allows easy, precise, time- and spectral-domain manipulations of the harmonic voice source. The synthesizer operates in near real-time, using a parsimonious set of acoustic parameters for the voice source and vocal tract that a user can modify to accurately copy the quality of most normal and pathological voices. For example, the ability to copy synthesize a voice also allows users to modify acoustic parameter at a time while holding all others constant, in order to evaluate its perceptual importance.

Documentation and Download

The manual describes three integrated programs: software for inverse filtering (invf.exe), voice synthesis (synthesis.exe), and voice analysis (sky.exe). This software was developed at the UCLA Bureau of Glottal Affairs, with support from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (grant DC01797). The software is distributed as shareware, and the code is available on request on an open source basis. All software is best suited for Windows computers with 1 GB or more of memory.

The executable files are available for download.