An analysis of voice quality of Chinese patients with depression

In the present study, we empirically explore how the voice quality of depression patients (as experimental group) differs from that of healthy people (as control group), in terms of jitter, shimmer, HNR and pitch. Our analysis results reveal that the shimmer, maximum HNR and minimum HNR of patients are significantly different from those of the control group. Specifically, the patients tend to have a higher shimmer and lower maximum and mean HNR. To figure out to what extent the emotion has influenced the results, we further investigate whether there are significant differences in voice quality among different variations of emotion (positive, neutral, and negative) embedded in text reading. It turns out that no significant differences in voice hoarseness are found, showing that the voice quality is immune to emotion. Therefore, we can conclude that in general the voice of depression patients is hoarser than non-depressed people.