ISCA Archive MAVEBA 1999
ISCA Archive MAVEBA 1999

Automatic assessment of voice quality using fundamental harmonic normalised spectra and Gaussian mixtures

M. A. McGillion, R. T. Ritchings, C. J. Moore

Classification of speech data from male volunteers (normal) and patients recovering from cancer of the larynx (abnormal) is discussed. Analysis of normals and abnormals has shown that there is a significant distinction in the fundamental frequency and harmonic envelope between these groups during constant phonation of vowel sounds. This work proposes a method of deriving the Fundamental-Harmonic Normalised (FHN) spectrum from the speech data and fitting a mixture of Gaussians to model the distribution of power within the FHN spectrum. The aim of this work is to provide a set of features for subsequent classification using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN).