KBF/HRS Voice, Speech and Hearing

Lecturer: Jan Švec
Lecture: 2 hours/week + exercise 1 hour/week
Credits: 4
Winter semester
Form of course completion: exam

• Anatomy of the voice and speech organs, breathing airways and larynx, cartillaginous laryngeal skeleton, muscles and nerves of the vocal folds, tissue structure of the vocal folds.
• Fundamental characteristics of sound. Periodic and non-periodic sounds, their waveform and spectrum. Fundamental bioacoustic characteristics of voice and speech – fundamental frequency, volume and sound specrum.
• Voice production in humans. Source-filter theory.
• Vocal fold vibrations, adjustment of fundamental frequency, volume and voice registers.
• Production of vowels in the cavities of the vocal tract, cavity resonances, acoustic differences in vowels - vowel formants.
• Human voice range, its measurement and display through a voice range profile.
• Voice disorders and basics of their treatment, voice hygiene.
• Speech: vowels and consonants, articulation, acoustic analysis of speech, spectrography, automatic recognition of speech.
• Acoustic and physiologic methods of voice evaluation. Microphones, their frequency and directional characteristics, "proximity effect". Basics of sound digitization. Spectral analysis of voice and speech. Electroglottography (EGG), photoglottography, pneumotachography, direct and indirect measurement of subglottal pressure, Laryngoscopic methods: laryngoscopy, strobolaryngoscopy, high-speed laryngeal imaging, videokymography.
• Hearing: anatomy of the hearing organ (outer, middle and inner ear), theories of hearing, inner and outer hair cells, air and bone conduction.
• Hearing range. Hearing threshold. Sound intensity and intensity level. Sound pressure and sound pressure level. Loudness level. Equal loudness contours, fundaments of psychoacoustics.
• Methods of hearing examination, basics of audiology: hearing tests with pitch forks, audiogram, tympanography, otoacoustic emissions, BERA.
• Hearing impairment and its correction, hearing aids.