Voice, or phonation quality, is a central concept across multiple domains of phonetic theory. However, the acoustic measurements used to quantify voice quality are far from straightforward. Recently, Chai and Garellek J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152(3), 1856–1870 (2022) proposed residual H1* as an improvement over the oft-used H1*–H2* measure. Here, this Letter raises concerns about the robustness of their conclusion due to incomplete random-effect structures in their models. The Letter suggests that reducing descriptions of voice quality to a single measure might not be adequate and multiple measures are needed to capture the inherent multidimensionality of voice quality.
Lo et al. (Sun,) studied this question.