Cepstral Analysis of Voice

A “cepstrum” is produced via a Fourier transform of the logarithm power spectrum of an acoustic signal; it was originally described as a procedure for extracting the fundamental frequency (F0) from the spectrum of a sound wave. Beyond its use in F0 estimation, cepstral analysis has been used as a measure of voice quality for vowels and continuous speech samples that addresses the shortcomings of traditional perturbation methods of acoustic analysis such as jitter (a measure of frequency instability) and shimmer (a measure of amplitude instability).

A measure of the normalized amplitude of the cepstral peak in relation to other cepstral coefficients and values referred to as the “cepstral peak prominence” (CPP) has been reported to be particularly effective in the quantification of disordered voice quality. ...