Acoustic Analysis and Modeling of Pathological Voices

November 19, 2007
Benedito G. Aguiar Neto | University of Campina Grande, Brazil & Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington, Tacoma

Disorders in voice are common and presently have been increasing due to unhealthy habits and vocal abuse. As well, there are a great range of diseases which cause modification of the speech, for example which belong to a class of neuro-degenerative diseases. It is well known that most of the vocal and voice diseases cause changes in the acoustic voice signal. Acoustic analysis of the speech signal may be used as complementary tool in laryngoscopy to diagnose this sort of disease. Speech processing is particularly interesting due to the simplicity and the noninvasive nature of the measurement procedure for the achievement of the acoustic voice analysis. In the presentation, principles and previous studies will be shown to specify and model the most significant acoustic characteristic of disordered voices as basis for the development of effective methods on the purpose of discriminating between normal and pathological voices or for predicting perceived voice quality or the severity of voice disorder. The acoustic modeling of pathological voice is based on a parametric representation of speech, as well a nonparametric approach, and a statistical approach for classifier design.

Speaker Details

Benedito Guimarães Aguiar Neto was born in São Luis, State of Maranhão, Brazil in 1954. He received his Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering, 1977, his Master Degree in Electrical Engineering, 1982, both from Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB), Brazil, and his Doctor Degree, in the area of Speech Processing, from Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Fernmeldetechnik, Berlin, Germany, in 1987.From August 1978 to March 2002 he was Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB), where he reached in 1996 a position as Full Professor. Since April 2002 he has been Full Professor at the Academic Unit of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG). He is Member of the Deliberative Board of the Presbyterian University Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brazil. Now he is with the Institute of Technology at the University of Washington Tacoma as a Visiting Scholar. Dr. Benedito Guimarães Aguiar Neto is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Brazilian Telecommunications Society (SBrT), Brazilian Society for the Development of Science (SBPC) and Brazilian Association of Engineering Education (ABENGE).