Vocal Cues of Disordered Voices: An Overview

The purpose of the article is to give an overview of vocal cues of disordered voices and propose a classificatory framework. Generally speaking, vocal cues of disordered voices are numeric descriptors or measurements that are clinically relevant and that summarize properties of speech signals or other signals that are obtained non-invasively, and which report on a speaker's phonation in general and voice in particular. One known difficulty is the existence of a large variety of published experimental procedures and data. The diversity is indeed impressive with regard to the vocal pathologies or handicaps that have been studied, the vocal symptoms that have been described, the tasks speakers have been asked to carry out and the linguistic, paralinguistic and extra-linguistic performances that have been examined, the sensors that have been used and the speech material that has been recorded, as well as the non-acoustic levels of description acoustic cues have been correlated with. As a consequence, one may experience difficulties distilling general rules or comparing results obtained in different frameworks.