Duration of voicing and silence periods of continuous speech in different acoustic environments

Abstract

This work deals with the duration of voicing and silence periods of continuous speech in rooms with very different reverberation times (RTs). Measurements were conducted using the Ambulatory Phonation Monitoring (APM) 3200 (Kaypentax, Montvale, NJ) and Voice-Care devices (developed at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy), both of which have a contact microphone placed on the base of the neck to detect skin vibrations during phonation. Six university professors and 22 university students made short laboratory monologs in which they explained something that they knew well to a listener 6 m away. Seven students also described a map with the intention of correctly explaining directions to a listener who drew the path on a blank chart. Longer speech samples were made by 25 primary school teachers in classrooms. A tendency to increase the voicing periods as the RT increased was on average observed for the university professors, the school teachers, and the university students who described a map. These students also showed longer silence periods than the students who made short monologs. The recognized trends concerned voice professionals or subjects who were highly motivated to make themselves understood in a perturbed speaking situation. Nonparametric statistical tests, which were applied to detect the differences in distributions of voicing and silence periods, have basically supported the findings.

Speech Adjustments for Room Acoustics and Their Effects on Vocal Effort

“…A similar trend was found by Astolfi et al 2 , although in the present study higher D t_p values were observed. In this study, the speech material was a read text, while Astolfi et al 2 used free speech. This difference in the speech material may have caused the differences in the range of D t_p values.…”

“…This vocal output is affected by various factors such as the type of environment 1–2 and interlocutor. 3 …”

“…2 The influence of different acoustic environments on the duration of voicing and silence frames in continuous speech was investigated by Astolfi et al 2 Part of their study involved the analysis of phonation time in percent ( D t_p ) from free speech of 5 minutes in duration, which was performed by twenty-two university students in a reverberant room and a semi-anechoic room ( T 30, 0.5–2 kHz were 7.38 s and 0.11 s, respectively) and by six professors in a reverberant room, a semi-reverberant room and an anechoic room ( T 30, 0.5–2 kHz were 3.51 s, 1.73 s and 0.05 s, respectively). Although the differences detected by the authors did not reach significance, they found a tendency for speakers in both groups to increase D t_p with the increase in reverberation.…”

Uncertainty of speech level parameters measured with a contact-sensor-based device and a headworn microphone

“…Furthermore, researchers are often interested in speech modifications due to different room acoustics or noise conditions (Astolfi et al, 2015), where speech level difference is mainly investigated.…”

Four-day-follow-up study on the voice monitoring of primary school teachers: Relationships with conversational task and classroom acoustics

“…For example, people tend to increase their voice level in noisy conditions, and this effect is well-known as the Lombard reflex. 13 In general, high noise levels and very long or very short reverberation times may bring to negative effects on the teachers' vocal load demand [14][15][16] and on the academic attainment of pupils. 17 Bottalico and Astolfi 18 used an APM 3200 to collect voice monitorings of 40 teachers from two primary schools that had different acoustic conditions.…”