The voice of COVID-19: Acoustic correlates of infection in sustained vowels.

Katrin D Bartl-Pokorny,Björn W Schuller,Shahin Amiriparian,Markus Wehler,Elena Kramer,Anton Batliner,Florian B Pokorny,Rainer Schönweiler,Anastasia Semertzidou,Florian Eyben,Florian Schmidt

doi:10.1121/10.0005194

Abstract

COVID-19 is a global health crisis that has been affecting our daily lives throughout the past year. The symptomatology of COVID-19 is heterogeneous with a severity continuum. Many symptoms are related to pathological changes in the vocal system, leading to the assumption that COVID-19 may also affect voice production. For the first time, the present study investigates voice acoustic correlates of a COVID-19 infection based on a comprehensive acoustic parameter set. We compare 88 acoustic features extracted from recordings of the vowels /i:/, /e:/, /u:/, /o:/, and /a:/ produced by 11 symptomatic COVID-19 positive and 11 COVID-19 negative German-speaking participants. We employ the Mann-Whitney U test and calculate effect sizes to identify features with prominent group differences. The mean voiced segment length and the number of voiced segments per second yield the most important differences across all vowels indicating discontinuities in the pulmonic airstream during phonation in COVID-19 positive participants. Group differences in front vowels are additionally reflected in fundamental frequency variation and the harmonics-to-noise ratio, group differences in back vowels in statistics of the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the spectral slope. Our findings represent an important proof-of-concept contribution for a potential voice-based identification of individuals infected with COVID-19.

Highlights

In December 2019 and early January 2020, a cluster of pneumonia cases with unknown cause emerged in China’s Hubei Province
We acoustically analysed sustained vowels produced by participants with a COVID-19 infection and a group of healthy controls
We identified a number of acoustic features to moderately differ between the two groups

Summary

Introduction

In December 2019 and early January 2020, a cluster of pneumonia cases with unknown cause emerged in China’s Hubei Province. The pneumonia was found to be caused by a novel coronavirus named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The disease spread quickly and the first known cases outside of China were identified in mid-January. On 11 February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 would be named COVID-19. A month later, the WHO announced COVID-19 as a pandemic. A year after the emergence of COVID-19, 98 794 942 confirmed cases including 2 124 193 deaths were reported to the WHO (2021)

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