Voice Acoustics

Voice acoustics is a subcategory of acoustic phonetics, which studies the physical properties of speech sound that is transmitted between mouth and ear. Voice acoustics is heavily based in instrumentation, physics, and math and interests researchers for its potential as a source of objective measures of voice. The subfield has its limitations, however, and reliability depends on investigator skill and correct use of instrumentation. Despite voice acoustic measurements often being referred to as objective, such measurements are often open to multiple interpretations. Another limitation of voice acoustics is the conflict between acoustic and auditory analyses, especially in certain measurements. This entry provides an overview of voice acoustics, including spectrograms, fundamental frequencies and harmonics, intensity, perturbation measures, relative noise level, and spectral measures.