J. Kreiman et Br. Gerratt, THE PERCEPTUAL STRUCTURE OF PATHOLOGICAL VOICE QUALITY, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100(3), 1996, pp. 1787-1795
Although perceptual assessment is included in most protocols for evalu
ating pathologic voices, a standard set of valid scales for measuring
voice quality has never been established. Standardization is important
for theory and for clinical acceptance, and also because validation o
f objective measures of voice depends on valid perceptual measures. Th
e present study used large sets (n=80) of male and female voices, repr
esenting a broad range of diagnoses and vocal severities. Eight expert
s judged the dissimilarity of each pair of voices, and responses were
analyzed using nonmetric individual differences multidimensional scali
ng. Results indicate that differences between listeners in perceptual
strategy are so great that the fundamental assumption of a common perc
eptual space must be questioned. Because standardization depends on th
e assumption that listeners are similar, it is concluded that efforts
to standardize perceptual labels for voice quality are unlikely to suc
ceed. However, analysis by synthesis may provide an alternate means of
modeling quality as a function of both voices and listeners, thus avo
iding this problem. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of America.