On the relative importance of vocal source, system, and prosody in human depression

In Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), neurophysiologic changes can alter motor control [1][2] and therefore alter speech production by influencing vocal fold motion (source), the vocal tract (system), and melody (prosody). In this paper, we use a database of voice recordings from 28 depressed subjects treated over a 6-week period [3] to compare correlations between features from each of the three speech-production components and clinical assessments of MDD. Toward biomarkers for audio-based continuous monitoring of depression severity, we explore the contextual dependence of these correlations with free-response and read speech, and show tradeoffs across categories of features in these two example contexts. Likewise, we also investigate the context-and speech component-dependence of correlations between our vocal features and assessment of individual symptoms of MDD (e.g., depressed mood, agitation, energy). Finally, motivated by our initial findings, we describe how context may be useful in “on-body” monitoring of MDD to facilitate identification of depression and evaluation of its treatment.