Phonatory Analysis on Parkinson's Disease Patients Attending Singing and Discussion Therapy (Parkinsonics) using Signal Processing Techniques

Persons with Parkinson's Disease (PD) frequently have speech and voice disorders. Regular speech therapy with a speech-language pathologist is essential to mitigate progressive symptom deterioration. Speech-related therapies, such choral singing groups are alternative approaches designed to be more naturalistic and enhance participant enjoyment. It is important to measure and quantify the effects of these therapies on the vocal features of PD patients to determine efficacy. We performed a prospective crossover study of 25 PD patients attending discussion or choral-singing groups for 12 weeks each (Parkinsonics NCT02753621). Every six weeks, each participant produced several recordings of the sustained vowels /a:/ and /e:/ at ‘normal’ and ‘maximum’ loudness. The goal was to identify if there are signal-processing-based features that can help track changes in the voice of PD patients over time. Voice features were extracted from these recordings using the Automatic Voice Condition Analysis (AVCA) library and were compared using non-parametric statistical tests. Results suggest that neither therapy caused any significant improvements in the analyzed phonatory aspects of the patients' voices. Future work should require use of connected speech to analyze articulation and comparison with a control group of participants with PD not attending any therapy to evaluate if therapy can mitigate the progressive effects of PD on the voice of patients.