Associate Professor Eva van Leer is working on a Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance-funded project to study a voice quality identification system.
van Leer will work with David Anderson, principal investigator and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Chuyao Feng, a Georgia Tech doctoral student, on the $39,971 project, entitled, “I-Vector Based Voice Quality Examination System.”
van Leer, Anderson and Feng have developed a preliminary way of identifying different voice quality modes for people who need voice therapy. Funding from the alliance will allow the research team to further develop their technique and apply it to voice patients during therapy sessions.
“When someone comes to voice therapy to improve the quality and resilience of their speaking voice, they can often improve their technique with the assistance of the speech-language pathologist in the therapy session but have trouble identifying whether they are in their ‘good voice’ when leaving the session,” she explained. “We’ve developed a way to identify this change in voice quality automatically.”
The Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance is an inter-institutional magnet that concentrates basic, translational and clinical research investigators, community clinicians, professional societies and industry collaborators in dynamic clinical and translational research projects. For more information, visit http://georgiactsa.org.