Chaos tool implementation for non-singer and singer voice comparison (preliminary study)

Abstract

Voice waveform is linked to the stretch, shorten, widen or constrict vocal tract. The articulation effects of the singer's vocal tract modify the voice acoustical characteristics and differ from the non-singer voices. In the last decades, Chaos Theory has shown the possibility to explore the dynamic nature of voice signals from a different point of view. The purpose of this paper is to apply the chaos technique of phase space reconstruction to analyze non- singers and singer voices in order to explore the signal nonlinear dynamic, and correlate them with traditional acoustic parameters. Eight voice samples of sustained vowel /i/ from non-singers and eight from singers were analyzed with "ANL" software. The samples were also acoustically analyzed with "Analise de Voz 5.0" in order to extract acoustic perturbation measures jitter and shimmer, and the coefficient of excess - (EX). The results showed different visual patterns for the two groups correlated with different jitter, shimmer, and coefficient of excess values. We conclude that these results clearly indicate the potential of phase space reconstruction technique for analysis and comparison of non-singers and singer voices. They also show a promising tool for training voices application.