Wavelet leader mulifractal analysis of period and amplitude sequences from sustained vowels

ROBERTO F. LEONARDUZZI; GABRIEL ALEJANDRO ALZAMENDI; GASTÓN SCHLOTTHAUER; MARÍA EUGENIA TORRES

SPEECH COMMUNICATION

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2015 vol. 72 p. 1 - 12

0167-6393

p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; line-height: 120%; }a:link { } Irregularities in the amplitude and period are characteristic of both normal and pathological sustained vowels, as a product of perturbations inherent in the phonation process. Their analysis provides useful diagnostic information for several vocal pathologies. Also, their accurate modelling has been shown to improve the quality of synthesized voice. In this work, we study the novel application of multifractal analysis for the characterization of amplitude and period fluctuations in sustained vowels. This signal processing tool provides a rich description of the fluctuations in the regularity of the data using a combination of high order statistics, and generalizes previous approaches. Our results suggest that both amplitude and period fluctuations show a multifractal behavior, for male and female speakers. We provide an example of the usefulness of multifractal attributes by studying the problem of classification between healthy and nonhealthy speakers. We conclude that amplitude and period sequences of sustained vowels should be analyzed and modelled by the multifractal paradigm.