Voice Quality - Science topic

i understand from the q, that you are looking for acoustic analysis software.

speech analyzer from SIL, would be an option.

it also has option for annotation.

if video recording and transcription and voice analysis all required then you can look at

elan or phon softwares.

https://www.phon.ca/phon-manual/getting_started.html#:~:text=Phon%20is%20a%20software%20program%20that%20supports%20the,clinical%29%20based%20on%20child%20or%20adult%20language%20data.

The available opensource (or low price) VoIP applications for test-bed are

I think there are a lot of potential answers to your question, based on the context of why you asked it in the first place. Audio forensics use software to compare voices to a database of millions of voices to measure the likelihood of a recorded voice being a specific person. See https://www.livescience.com/19506-audio-forensics-reveals-voices-secrets.html

In the realm of performance, actors rely on a range of vocal quality features in order to “transform” to sound different from the way they usually do. For example, they might add qualities such as “nasality” or “denasality” or “orality” to change the nature of their voice. They may implement greater “twang”, which is related to the higher frequencies (aka “the singer’s formant” which was first described by Sundberg) Uta was describing. Though they may adopt linguistic features, by changing their accent or modifying their lexicon, voice quality is at a deeper level. Other qualities include breathiness, harshness, brightness/dullness, etc. These are primarily subjective terms for the resonance qualities that Uta was discussing, that are shaped by the speaker’s vocal mechanism (anatomy) and how the speaker uses it.

This paper gives some information about acoustic measures in alaryngeal speakers with TEPs though I'm not sure it alone can qualify as normative data.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26395116 

This recent paper reviews the literature on the topic. 

There have also been a couple of papers that assessed acoustic features of other types of alaryngeal speech that might give some starting points. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27538050 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26575366

Sir, from elongated /a/ I can get source and filter characteristics of a person. But I am also interested in prosodic features such as stress, tone, pronunciation etc.

This is an interesting topic which I have been working on in my dissertation. The language pair I have studied is Finnish and English. 

Majority of the subjects in my research reported that their voices get tired faster in the foreign language than the native one. So, speaking a foreign language can cause subjective sensations of vocal fatigue. I think it can be caused, for example, by the fact that foreign language requires more mental  effort (and probably physical too) that it causes subjective sensations of fatigue to increase.

However, I have also found that speaking a foreign language can cause vocal overloading, which can be seen in acoustical parameters. One reason for loading can be that speaking the foreign language affects phonation which becomes more pressed. Sometimes it can be hard to define the changes between two languages, since some of the acoustical parameters are affected by the languages themselves. For example, different formant frequencies in languages may affect the spectrum. But, according to my results, voice quality investigated by inverse filtering showed also increased pressedness in the foreign language compared to the native one.

Also, perceptual analyses have shown that speakers´ voice quality may be different  in native and foreign languages.

So, I have concluded that speaking a foreign language can change voice quality. Or at least voice production.

Hello,

There's an implementation of some codecs in ffmpeg and libav libraries. You can install them easilly in Linux and use them to encode/decode your signals.

Greetings.

Phonotactics seem to matter...at least for hypothetical purchases.   Vitevitch & Donoso (2012) found that people indicated they'd be more likely to buy fictional products that had high probability names. 

The ITU-T G.xxx coders all have reference code in fixed-point C and text vectors to ensure proper implementation.

You can download them free-of-charge on the ITU site (www.itu.int). Go to "standardization" and then "publications".

Y(J)S

Your answer helped me a lot. It is very interesting what you expose. I will try it.

Thank you Irene, regards

Dear Dr. HaCohen-Kerner,

Matlab is probably an all purpose swiss-army-knife software for speech analysis. Another software is Praat http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/.

Praat can open/edit several sound files such as WAV files, AIFF files, AIFC files, FLAC files, and MP3 files. However, to my knowledge WAV is the most common format. 

Praat can be used for spectral analysis (spectrograms), pitch analysis, formant analysis, intensity analysis, jitter, shimmer, and voice breaks. In addition, the software incorporates speech synthesis facilities; It allows labelling and segmentation of speech sounds.

More advanced features of this software include the change of pitch and duration contours and filtering. Because Praat has its own scripting language, it also highly programmable,

References

Paul Boersma & David Weenink (2013). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.51, retrieved 2 June 2013 from http://www.praat.org/

See also Paul Boersma's page for additional references: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/praat.html

Kind Regards,

Charalambos Themistocleous

So I am not an expert in this area, but I do know of a few papers which examine vocal tone with other behaviors:

Zuckerman, Amidon, Bishop, & Pomerantz (1982, JPSP) shows that vocal tone relates to deception (though this effect is moderated by whether there are visual cues as well in the face).

One paper which more directly addresses your question is Freidman and DiMatteo (1980, Research in Personality), which examines medical doctors and found that personality clusters could be reliably identified with certain vocal tones).

There is an excellent article on this from Svec and Granqvist: "Guidelines for Selecting Microphones for Human Voice Production Research" in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Vol.19 356-368 November 2010. No brand names as in Patrice's comment, but a procedure to find the mic that serves you best.