acoustics and mental health

You know how sometimes your various interests end up interacting in surprising ways? Well, I was doing my homework when... (amazing how much of life can start that way) ... I learned that the study of acoustics of speech has been used in an investigation that indicates a possibility of recognizing between depressed versus non-depressed, and perhaps more importantly, depressed from suicidal people (the accuracy wasn't very good for a 100% perfectionist, but hey, it is a start) just by the acoustic properties of their speech, not their actual words. Here is a link that I was able to find thanks to my text book (that I was actually reading!) "Acoustical properties of speech as indicators of depression and suicidal risk" by France et al. It is actually pretty technical, considering I was only partially able to understand it after a month of study in a class on speech acoustics. But I found it exiting to see how mental illness and speech acoustics might relate.

Comments

  1. ElizaSeptember 30, 2012 at 8:04 AM

    That is very interesting! Thanks for the link!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 30, 2012 at 1:17 PM

    Wow! Who knew? What a great tool this might turn out to be, particularly identifying those at risk of suicide. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  3. 71ยบ & SunnySeptember 30, 2012 at 3:18 PM

    That is so cool, Abigail! Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tina Fariss BarbourSeptember 30, 2012 at 6:24 PM

    Thank you for telling us about this!

    ReplyDelete

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