Comparative Study of Filter Characteristics as Statistical Vocal Correlates of Clinical Psychiatric State in Human

Acoustical properties of speech have been shown to be related to mental states of speaker with symptoms: depression and remission. This paper describes way to address the issue of distinguishing depressed patients from remitted subjects based on measureable acoustics change of their spoken sound. The vocal-tract related frequency characteristics of speech samples from female remitted and depressed patients were analyzed via speech processing techniques and consequently, evaluated statistically by cross-validation with Support Vector Machine. Our results comparatively show the classifier's performance with effectively correct separation of 93% determined from testing with the subjectbased feature model and 88% from the frame-based model based on the same speech samples collected from hospital visiting interview sessions between patients and psychiatrists.

Authors:

• Thaweesak Yingthawornsuk
• Chusak Thanawattano

Keywords:

• Depression
• SVM
• Vocal Extract
• Vocal Tract

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