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Voice Quality Perception

Project: "Voice Quality Perception [NIH R01]"
Eligibility: Adults (18 years and older) with normal hearing.
Goal: To develop novel methods for quantifying voice quality in patients with laryngeal disorders
Contact Info: Auditory & Speech Sciences Laboratory; Email: assl@usf.edu; Phone: 813.974.4148; Mention the "Voice Quality Study."

Voice quality refers simply to the sound quality of a person's voice.  Each person has a unique voice quality but characteristics common with other voices.  Often, laryngeal pathology and neurological disorders lead to physical changes in the voice production system that influence voice quality.  For example, if one vocal fold is weakened, lesioned, or paralyzed, then voice quality will be more "breathy" than the voice otherwise would be.  An index of voice quality, therefore, may serve as important clinical metric, potentially providing initial symptoms of the underlying problem and often used as a measure of treatment outcome.  In general, measurement methods for voice quality lack the rigor used in the study of broader sound quality. The use of voice quality measures clinically would benefit from methods co-registered or validated with data from large numbers of "listeners."  Furthermore, scales of voice quality would allow one to quantify how much voice quality changes due to a pathology or to treatment.  Finally, if we can accurately predict voice quality perception based on computational models, we may be able to automate certain aspects of voice quality assessment. 

Participants in this study will serve as "listeners" in experiments that help us to evaluate measurement methods, computational models, and to develop formal scales for voice quality.  We hope you will consider serving as a participant in our voice quality research. You will be compensated with an hourly payment for your participation.

Please contact us to participate!