Investigating Automatic Vocal Rise Time Measurement Parameters and Multi-Corpus Vowel Onset Behavior with the Voice Onset Analysis Tool (VOAT).

Vocal rise time (VRT) acoustically measures from when vocal cord vibration begins to when phonation achieves a peak steady state. This acoustic-based study examines manual and automatic VRT measurements based on different vowel onset recordings (e.g., hard, modal, soft) from four datasets containing 146 adult Australian English-speaking females. Experiments test how the automatic Voice Onset Analysis Tool (VOAT) settings impact VRT measurement estimations. When compared to VOAT VRT baseline setting results, parameter adjustments using a Hilbert envelope 400 ms analysis segment with a low smoothing factor decreased VRT mean absolute error as low as 15.5 ms and 21.3 ms for modal and soft onsets, respectively. While the automated VOAT demonstrates objective repeatability with accelerated VRT extraction time advantages, still experiments herein show that the proposed adjusted settings are least accurate for hard onsets, whereby a mean absolute error as high as 71.0 ms is reported. Given three to five voice therapy sessions, females with voice disorders exhibited an 11% increase in VOAT VRT durations with reduced variation (6%), providing preliminary clinical evidence that this measure can assist in monitoring patients' progress. This study reveals cross-corpora VRT norms per voice onset type, discusses VOAT parameter effects, and supports future automated VRT algorithm considerations.