Acoustic Correlates of Breathy Vocal Quality

TLDR

The study aimed to assess how well various acoustic metrics predict perceived breathiness. Recordings of 15 healthy adults producing vowels at normal, moderate, and high breathiness were rated by listeners, and acoustic features—signal periodicity, first harmonic amplitude, and spectral tilt—were extracted. Signal periodicity explained about 80 % of the variance in breathiness ratings, outperforming first harmonic amplitude and spectral tilt, which showed only moderate and weak correlations, respectively.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of several acoustic measures in predicting breathiness ratings. Recordings were made of eight normal men and seven normal women producing normally phonated, moderately breathy, and very breathy sustained vowels. Twenty listeners rated the degree of breathiness using a direct magnitude estimation procedure. Acoustic measures were made of: (a) signal periodicity, (b) first harmonic amplitude, and (c) spectral tilt. Periodicity measures provided the most accurate predictions of perceived breathiness, accounting for approximately 80% of the variance in breathiness ratings. The relative amplitude of the first harmonic correlated moderately with breathiness ratings, and two measures of spectral tilt correlated weakly with perceived breathiness.