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Based On Its Original Form, A Novel Voice Production Algorithm For Dysphonia Patients
The speaking ability, which is in the nature of the human beings and is the most important trait that distinguishes humans from the other living creatures, is the most important element of the communication. Sound is the basic property of speaking, thus any sound problem resulting in communication loss impacts the human beings socially.
Dysphonia is a medical term that defines the distorted sound production of vocal chords owing to functional or organic reasons. Dysphonia occurs in the case of pathologies observed in the vocal tract or in extra physiological cases. Dysphonic sound can be cracked, excessively aspirated, rough or whispering.

Dysphonia affects communication and social life, psychological and emotional problems are observed in the patients as a direct result of this speaking disorder. (Krischke at al, 2005). According to the research findings, individuals with dysphonia disorder experience many difficulties and these resemble the difficulties of people with hearing impairment.

This thesis study is aiming at producing healthy sound for the individuals who lost their voice due to chronical sound disorders like vocal cord paralysis, larynx cancer and organic lesions in vocal chords by reconstructing their whisper-like voice according to features taken from their previous sound recordings

In the second part of this thesis, the speech production and speech processing in humans and the sound features of Turkish language have been discussed. The processing principles and methods of Automatic Speech Recognition System (ASR) have been presented.

And dysphonic speech, vocal tract, larynx cancer and speech after laryngectomy have been mentioned. The differences between healthy speech and dysphonic speech have been examined and other studies in the literature have been presented.
In the third part, a Novel Voice Production Algorithm which has been developed in the context of this study and various approaches have been detailed.
Finally, the findings have been discussed and in the last part the conclusions of the study have been evaluated.