On the impact of non-modal phonation on phonological features

Abstract

Different modes of vibration of the vocal folds contribute significantly to the voice quality. The neutral mode phonation, often said as a modal voice, is one against which the other modes can be contrastively described, called also non-modal phonations.This paper investigates the impact of non-modal phonation on phonological posteriors, the probabilities of phonological features inferred from the speech signal using deep learning approach. Five different non-modal phonations are considered: falsetto, creaky, harshness, tense and breathiness are considered, and their impact on phonological features, the Sound Patterns of English (SPE), is investigated, in both speech analysis and synthesis tasks. We found that breathy and tense phonation impact the SPE features less, creaky phonation impacts the features moderately, and harsh and falsetto phonation impact the phonological features the most.

Characterisation of voice quality of Parkinson’s disease using differential phonological posterior features

“…Voice quality of the speech sounds can be characterised by phonological features (Cernak et al, 2017b), and the current work proposes to use differential phonological posterior features (between modal and non-modal, and between healthy and disordered phonations) for characterisation of both healthy non-modal and parkinsionian phonations. Comparing to the work of Cernak et al (2017b), the novel aspects of this paper is in using pathological speech and characterization of pathological voice quality using healthy non-modal voice quality "base/eigenspace". An Euclidean distance between the non-modal and disordered phonation characterisations quantifies the composition of non-modal voice qualities in PD.…”