Least Mean Square Measures of Voice Perturbation

Abstract

A signal processing technique is described for measuring the jitter, shimmer, and signal-to-noise ratio of sustained vowels. The measures are derived from the least mean square fit of a waveform model to the digitized speech waveform. The speech waveform is digitized at an 8.3 kHz sampling rate, and an interpolation technique is used to improve the temporal resolution of the model fit. The ability of these procedures to measure low levels of perturbation is evaluated both on synthetic speech waveforms and on the speech recorded from subjects with normal voice characteristics.