Comparison of voice acquisition methodologies in speech research

The use of voice acoustic techniques has the potential to extend beyond work devoted purely to speech or vocal pathology. For this to occur, however, researchers and clinicians will require acquisition technologies that provide fast, accurate, and cost-effective methods for recording data. Therefore, the present study aimed to compare industry-standard techniques for acquiring high-quality acoustic signals (e.g., hard drive and solid-state recorder) with widely available and easy-to-use, computer-based (standard laptop) data-acquisition methods. Speech samples were simultaneously acquired from 15 healthy controls using all three methods and were analyzed using identical analysis techniques. Data from all three acquisition methods were directly compared using a variety of acoustic correlates. The results suggested that selected acoustic measures (e.g.,f0 noise-to-harmonic ratio, number of pauses) were accurately obtained using all three methods; however, minimum recording standards were required for widely used measures of perturbation.