Perturbation and Nonlinear Dynamic Analysis of Sustained Vowels in Normal and Pathological Voices

In this paper, we investigate the acoustic characteristics of sustained voices from normal subjects and patients with laryngeal pathologies. Perturbation methods (including jitter and shimmer), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and nonlinear dynamic methods (such as correlation dimension) are used to analyze normal and pathological voices. We find that jitter does not statistically discriminate between normal and pathological voices, but a significant difference is found for shimmer, SNR, and correlation dimension. The results suggest that nonlinear dynamic analysis may be valuable for the analysis of normal and pathological voices but perturbation analysis should be applied with caution for pathological voice analysis.