Acoustic Signal Typing for Evaluation of Voice Quality in Tracheoesophageal Speech * †Corina J. van As-Brooks, †Florien J. Koopmans-van Beinum, †Louis C.W. Pols, and *†‡Frans J.M. Hilgers Amsterdam, The Netherlands Summary: Because of the aperiodicity of many tracheoesophageal voices, acoustic analysis of the tracheoesophageal voice is less straightforward than that of the normal voice. This study presents the development and testing of an acoustic signal typing system based on visual inspection of a narrow-band spectrogram that can be used by researchers for classification of voice quality in tracheoesophageal speech. In addition to this classification system, a selection of acoustic measures [median fundamental frequency, standard deviation of fundamental frequency, jitter, percentage of voiced (%Voiced), harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), glottal-to-noise excitation (GNE) ratio, and band energy difference (BED)] was computed to provide more insight into the acoustic components of tracheoesophageal voice quality. For clinical relevance, relationships between the acoustic signal types and an overall judgment of the voice were investigated as well. Results showed that the four acoustic signal types form a good basis for performing more acoustic analyses and give a good impression of the overall quality of the voice. Key Words: Acoustic analysis—Laryngectomy—Tracheoesophageal speech— Voice prosthesis. INTRODUCTION Voice quality is a perceptual phenomenon, and consequently, perceptual evaluations are considered the ‘‘gold standard’’ of voice quality evaluation. Disadvantages of perceptual evaluations are that listeners differ in their opinion about voice quality and that it is time consuming to acquire these judgments, because many raters are needed to obtain sufficient inter- and intrarater reliability. 1 In clinical practice, perceptual evaluations play a prominent role in therapy evaluation purposes. Acoustic analyses are usually not routinely performed for clinical purposes. Acoustic measures do not show a one-to-one relationship with perceptual evaluation Accepted for publication April 8, 2005. Supported in part by a grant from the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and from the Department of Speech and Language of the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The Maurits and Anna de Kock Foundation provided financial support for the equipment needed for the speech recordings, acoustic analyses, and the listening experiment. From the *Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Netherlands Cancer Institute/Antoni van Leeuwen- hoek Hospital, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the †Institute of Phonetic Sciences, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and ‡Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Frans J. M. Hilgers, Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Sur- gery, The Netherlands Cancer Institute/Antoni van Leeuwen- hoek Hospital, Plesmanlaan 121, 1066CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: f.hilgers@nki.nl Journal of Voice, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 355–368 0892-1997/$32.00 Ó 2006 The Voice Foundation doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2005.04.008 355