We first present a unified view of various jitter and shimmer measurements from pathological voice and propose a novel perturbation parameter to characterize jitter and shimmer well. The parameter is shown to be correlated better with perceptual judgments made by a trained laryngologist than some well-known jitter/shimmer parameters. Although most of the jitter/shimmer parameters have been devised to represent the overall degree of the hoarseness of voice, multidimensional measurements are often needed to gain a deeper insight into perturbation characteristics of the hoarseness. We propose an autoregressive-moving average (ARMA) analysis method to represent the perturbation characteristics and indicate that ARMA parameters provide with useful information on the perturbation properties.

Keywords: Pathological voice, perturbation parameters, jitter, shimmer