Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License Perceptual and Acoustic Differences between Aging Voice and Dysphonic Voice

This study aimed to investigate the differences between dysphonic and aging voice from perceptual and acoustic perspectives. Ten listeners listened to 64 voice stimuli collected from 32 Cantonese subjects to determine whether they were dysphonic or non-dysphonic under two testing conditions, one with age information of each speaker given and the other without age information provided. The perceptual analysis showed that when age information was provided the listeners judged more older female subjects to have non-dysphonic voice than when no age information was given. Therefore, the perceptual voice qualities previously perceived as dysphonic might be reconsidered as normal aging when age of speaker was known. In addition, more older subjects were judged as dysphonic than the young adult. The presence of aging that resulted in increase judgment of dysphonic again suggests the aging voice and dysphonic voice were found to be similar perceptually. Voice stimuli from the young dysphonic subjects and older subjects with normal voice were compared on the measures of five acoustic measures including mean fundamental frequency (Hz), standard deviation of fundamental frequency (Hz), jitter (%), shimmer (dB), and noise to harmonic ratio. However, the present study failed to show the similarity between aging voice and dysphonic voice on acoustic measures based on qualitative description