Accurate measurements of jitter, shimmer, and glottal turbulence noise from sustained vowels

There has been much research on the measurement of jitter, shimmer, and glottal turbulence noise from sustained vowels, primarily aiming at acoustic quantification of pathological voices. Many problems remain unsolved, however, specifically those of accurate methods for the pitch extraction and noise measurement and of quantification of shimmer. This paper describes a sophisticated method for the pitch period determination based on a cycle‐to‐cycle similarity of the waveform and a novel method to quantify shimmer characteristics. In this method, shimmer is analyzed for the individual harmonic component of the waveform in terms of its variations in amplitude and phase characteristics. Acoustic measurements of glottal turbulence noise due to insufficient vocal‐fold closure are also discussed. Efficacy of the new methods for the measurement of jitter, shimmer, and noise is compared with previous work using pathological voice samples. [Work supported by a Grant‐in‐Aid from the Ministry of Education, Science a...