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How to determine the pathological type and read the acoustic signal typing
Record or Open an /a/ sound, select a stable part of the recording and add information about the speaker and recording:
A short description of the criteria to determine the pathological type is displayed when you click on the Pathology button on the Configuration page. It can also be found on the Acoustic Signal Typing manual page.
The criteria for the pathological typing are mostly impressionistic. This is about the ability of the speaker to produce a stable /a/ sound with many harmonics. This can be evaluated by listening to the sound, and looking at the Spectrogram. Inspection of the Pitch and Harmonicity displays will give extra information.
When a voice has been evaluated and a type decided upon, the type can be entered by pressing one of the number keys, 1-4 for types I - IV. The types can always be changed. The currently selected type will be printed over the display and stored together with the boundaries of the current selection in the table with speaker data. Pressing 0 will erase the type and the boundaries. Pressing 9 will set the boundaries but will not change the type.
There is also an automatic evaluation of pathological type. The displays for Pitch, Ltas, and Harmonicity contain pathological type estimates preceded by "AST:" (Acoustic Signal Typing) based on individual acoustic measures. The median value of these measures is displayed in arabic numerals (1-4) as long as no pathological type has been entered by hand. Note that the automatic AST will only be calculated from measures for which the display has been shown (calculated). So it will change until all the relevant displays have been shown. The median AST will be calculated when a report is generated.
© R.J.J.H. van Son, December 20, 2011