15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
This study examines the differences between young and old adult voices.
Acoustic cues in voices that enable listeners to recognize a speaker's
vocal age are specified as well as acoustic cues that straightly indicate
the speaker's chronological age. Electroglottographic data were used
to directly examine glottal behaviour in aging voices.
We found
a strong spectral attenuation of high frequencies in aging male voices
assumed to result from rather sinusoidal glottal excitation. Increasing
amplitude perturbation is an indicator of increasing age even on the
basis of spontaneous speech. Reading rate decreases with increasing
age, whereas there is no significant change in articulation rate of
spontaneous speech in women's voices. Based on sustained vowels of
female voices, the frequency tremor intensity index indicates age more
accurately than F0 and amplitude perturbations. We also found evidence
for the relevance of the vowel onset to recognize age more accurately.
Bibliographic reference. Winkler, Ralf / Brückl, M. / Sendlmeier, Walter F. (2003): "The aging voice: an acoustic, electroglottographic and perceptive analysis of male and female voices", In ICPhS-15, 2869-2872.