Prosodic impairment analysis tool

Authors

Ing. Zoltán Galáž, Ing. Jiří Mekyska, prof. Ing. Zdeněk Smékal, CSc.

Download

It is possible to download software here.

Publication to be cited

Zoltan Galaz, Jiri Mekyska, Zdenek Mzourek, Zdenek Smekal, Irena Rektorova, Ilona Eliasova, Milena Kostalova, Martina Mrackova, Dagmar Berankova, Prosodic analysis of neutral, stress-modified and rhymed speech in patients with Parkinson’s disease, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed., Volume 127, April 2016, Pages 301-317, ISSN 0169-2607, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2015.12.011.

Description

Hypokinetic dysarthria (HD) is a frequent speech disorder associated with the presence of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD). Recent research in this field of science has reported that impairment of speech prosody (dysprosody) in HD has a detrimental impact on speech naturalness (emotions, accent, stress, rhythm, etc.). Dysprosody is generally characterized by impaired speech melody and often results into quiet and monotonous speech. Using modern signal processing methods, it is possible to quantify these speech flaws. Specifically, in the case of dysprosody in HD, the analysis of fundamental frequency and squared energy operator can be used.

Prosodic impairment analysis tool provides an easy quantification and visualization of melody of speech. This tool uses functions specifically designed to extract speech features describing prosodic flaws in HD, namely: monopitch and monoloudness. Graphical users interface enables user to easily load an input *.wav file and extract the prosodic features, update the table of features, and plot the fundamental frequency and squared energy operator estimation, by one click. This GUI also enables user to export the table of features to the output *.xlsx or *.csv files.

Projects

This work was supported by projects NT13499, VG20102014033 and FEKT-S-14-2335. The described research was performed in laboratories supported by the SIX project; the registration number CZ.1.05/2.1.00/03.0072, the operational program Research and Development for Innovation.

License

To negotiate the license terms of use of this software please contact the responsible person Ing. Lukas Novak at Technology Transfer Office, Brno University of Technology, Kounicova 966/67a, Veveří, 60200, Brno, Czech Republic, novak@ro.vutbr.cz.