Re: Voice Quality

["Kim, Doh-Suk (DS)" <dsk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Srk,

There is a standard recommendation P.862 from ITU-T. It is called, PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality) and is designed to estimate the quality of speech processed by telephone networks. It basically compares a reference speech and it's degraded version to come up with the estimated quality of the degraded speech in MOS-scale. It's probably what you're looking for.

You can find some references in the issue J. Audio Eng. Soc., October 2002.

Regards,

---
Doh-Suk Kim


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Seetharamakrishnan [mailto:seethark@ETH.NET]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 12:01 PM
> To: AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA
> Subject: Voice Quality
>
>
> Dear Friends
>
> I am not an expert in voice analysis, but yet I have to
> assess voice quality
> from conversational speech.
> ie Compare an "ideal voice" with spoken voice. ie The ideal
> voice would be
> recorded when the voice quality is good. And whenever the same person
> speaks, his/her voice will be compared to this ideal voice
> parameters and
> deviations will be indicated. The content and duration of the
> ideal voice
> and spoken voice will be different. I have some software to
> measure sound
> analysis parameters like Intensity, Pitch, HNR, Mean DB, SD, Jitter,
> Shimmer, Silence,  Unvoiced frames etc..
>
> I dont know how to correlate between the measured values and
> the perceived
> quality of voice.
> Now my question is, what measurement parameters can be
> reliably used in
> order to compare the "ideal voice" and spoken voice  and how ?
>
> Only criteria is that the spoken voice should have definitely deviated
> qualitywise in some manner or other.
> I am not able to arrive at what measurements I can reliably
> and consistently
> use to satisfy the above criteria though I know that certain
> measurements
> like mean DB, mean Pitch, silence percentage, number of
> unvoiced frames,
> voice breaks etc can be used.
>
> One more thing is, whether the how much window size (time in
> seconds) should
> be taken to arrive at some reliable comparison.
>
> Any light on this topic would be appreciated.
>
> Regards
> srk
>