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Acoustic analysis of voice using WPCVox: a comparative study with Multi Dimensional Voice Program

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Abstract

In this study, two different tools developed for the parametric extraction and acoustic analysis of voice samples are compared. The main goal of the paper is to contrast the results obtained using the classical Multi Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP), with the results obtained with the novel WPCVox. The aim of this comparison was to find differences and similarities in the parameters extracted with both systems in order to make comparison of measurements and data transfer among both equipments. The study was carried out in two stages: in the first, a wide sample of healthy voices belonging to Spanish-speaking adults from both genders were used to carry out a direct comparison between the results given by MDVP and those obtained with WPCVox. In the second stage, a sample of 200 speakers (53 normal and 173 pathological) taken from a commercially available database of voice disorders were used to demonstrate the usefulness of WPCVox for the acoustic analysis and the characterization of normal and pathological voices. The results conclude that WPCVox provides very reliable measurements which are very similar to those obtained using MDVP, and very similar capabilities to discriminate among normal and pathological voices.

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Notes

  1. Not all the patients were subjected to an endoscopy; only those presenting a vocal disorder based on a previous psychoacoustic judgement of their voice. In total, 200 patients underwent these exploration techniques.

  2. Contrasting is more confident evaluating the statistical significance with 95% than 99%.

  3. The normative values in the MDVP manual were obtained with English speakers from the sustained phonation of vowel ‘ah’

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially carried out under grants: TIC2003-08956-C02-00 from the Ministry of Education of Spain, and AL06-EX-PID-033 from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Circuits & Systems Engineering, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, EUIT Telecomunicación, Ctra. Valencia km. 7, Campus Politécnico, 28031, Madrid, Spain

    Juan Ignacio Godino-Llorente, Víctor Osma-Ruiz & Nicolás Sáenz-Lechón

  2. ENT Department, Alcalá de Henares, Hospital Príncipe de Asturias, Madrid, Spain

    Ignacio Cobeta-Marco & Ramón González-Herranz

  3. ENT Department, Hospital Gregorio Marañón, Madrid, Spain

    Carlos Ramírez-Calvo

Authors
  1. Juan Ignacio Godino-Llorente
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  2. Víctor Osma-Ruiz
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  3. Nicolás Sáenz-Lechón
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  4. Ignacio Cobeta-Marco
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  5. Ramón González-Herranz
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  6. Carlos Ramírez-Calvo
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Correspondence to Juan Ignacio Godino-Llorente.

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Godino-Llorente, J.I., Osma-Ruiz, V., Sáenz-Lechón, N. et al. Acoustic analysis of voice using WPCVox: a comparative study with Multi Dimensional Voice Program. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol 265, 465–476 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-007-0467-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-007-0467-x

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