Bruce J. Poburka
Dept. of Commun. Disord., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1500 Highland Ave., Rm. 461, Madison, WI 53705
Paul H. Milenkovic Diane M. Bless
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53705
The authors' clinical experience with dedicated instruments for voice aerodynamic measurements prompts them to implement these measurements on a microcomputer system. A microcomputer system can be lower in cost, it facilitates archival storage of data, it offers the flexibility of changing what is measured and it offers automated post processing. A system measuring flow, intensity, intraoral pressure, and pitch is implemented on a PC compatible computer, using an Intel 486 microprocessor, running the CSpeech waveform acquisition and analysis software. The salient enhancements to CSPeech used to implement this system are described. The record command was modified to provide visual feedback of voice aerodynamic efficiency, and a pause/resume feature simplifies clinical voice recording procedures. Filter scripts were developed to provide a flexible way to specify analysis procedures and formats for archival storage and retrieval. The filter script is based on the object-oriented concept of specifying both the data and a method for analyzing or archiving the data in the desired form.