Purpose: Laryngeal high-speed videoendoscopy (LHSV) has been recognized as a highly valuable modality for the scientific investigations of vocal fold (VF) vibrations. In contrast to stroboscopic imaging, LHSV enables visualizing aperiodic VF vibrations. However, the technique is less well established in the clinical care of disordered voices,…

While research on sound and education has opened up important pathways, it dominantly approaches sound as meaningful. This paper charts another tendency, exploring sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at understanding. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with…

English proficiency assessments have become a necessary metric for filtering and selecting prospective candidates for both academia and industry. With the rise in demand for such assessments, it has become increasingly necessary to have the automated human-interpretable results to prevent inconsistencies and ensure meaningful feedback to the…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine how aging and modifications of critical acoustic parameters may affect the perception of whispered speech as a degraded signal. Method: Forty Mandarin-speaking adults were included in the study. Part 1 of the study compared the perception of Mandarin lexical tones, vowels, and syllables in older and younger…

Our study proposes the use of a free classification task for investigating the dimensions used by listeners in their perception of nonnative sounds and for predicting the perceptual discriminability of nonnative contrasts. In a free classification task, participants freely group auditory stimuli based on their perceived similarity. The results can…

Previous research on infant-directed speech (IDS) and its role in infants' language development has largely focused on mothers, with fathers being investigated scarcely. Here we examine the acoustics of IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in Norwegian mothers and fathers to 8-month-old infants, and whether these relate to direct…

It is not unusual that people have to write in an environment where background speech is present. Background speech can vary in both speech intelligibility and location of the sound source. Earlier research has shown disruptive effects of background speech on writing performance. To expand and reinforce this knowledge, the present study…

Purpose: Recent studies have shown that an acoustic measure, relative fundamental frequency (RFF), has potential for the assessment of excessive laryngeal tension and vocal effort associated with functional and neurological voice disorders. This study presents an analysis of the test-retest reliability of RFF in individuals with healthy voices and…

Purpose: This study details the intended and unintended consequences of pitch shifting with the commercially available Eventide Eclipse. Method: Ten vocally healthy participants (M = 22.0 years; 6 cisgender females, 4 cisgender males) produced a sustained /?/, creating an input signal. This input signal was processed in near real time by the…

Purpose: This study sought to identify the articulator-specific mechanisms that underlie reduced and enhanced acoustic vowel contrast in talkers with dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Seventeen talkers with mild-moderate dysarthria due to PD and 17 controls completed a sentence repetition task using typical, slow, loud, and clear…

Purpose: Spectral modulation detection is an increasingly common assay of suprathreshold auditory perception and has been correlated with speech perception performance. Here, the potential effects of stimulus duration and stimulus presentation level on spectral modulation detection were investigated. Method: Spectral modulation detection…

Purpose: This study compared auditory-perceptual measures of presence/absence and severity of vocal tremor to acoustic markers of vocal tremor. The validity (both concurrent and diagnostic) of various acoustic markers of vocal tremor was also assessed. Method: Fifty-six midvowel sustained [a:] recordings were selected to yield a representative…

Objective: This study investigated pressurized transient evoked otoacoustic emission (TEOAE) responses and wideband absorbance (WBA) in healthy ears and ears with negative middle ear pressure (NMEP). Method: In this cross-sectional study, TEOAE amplitude, signal-to-noise ratio, and WBA were measured at ambient and tympanometric peak pressure (TPP)…

Purpose: The aims of this study were (a) to validate the wideband acoustic immittance (WAI) model developed by Myers et al. (2018a) in a new sample of neonates and (b) to develop a prediction model for diagnosing middle ear dysfunction in infants aged 6-18 months using wideband absorbance, controlling for the effect of age. Method: Tympanometry,…

A discussion of audio tones in the physics classroom will include mention of their frequency. The frequency of a periodic signal is a well-defined quantity that can readily be measured. A concept related to frequency is that of pitch. Pitch is a perceived quantity that cannot be measured directly and is most important when listeners characterize…