Pynchon's vocal profile

[Terrance]

Different accents or dialects (languages) can't be directly compared. So
you should  compare Pynchon's vocal profile with Long Island voices. If
you measure a speaker from Long Island with Rochester NY  parameters
he/she will register as depressed. Also, if you plan to compare Pynchon
with past speakers of his language, say Whitman,  you need to account
for the fact that today's Long Islanders generally have lower voices
than those decades ago. Also,  recording techniques can cause error in
analysis. If you compare Whitman with Pynchon you need to account for
the fact that in the older data the  midrange frequencies are more
pronounced. 

Here is what our team of experts is, ah, thinking. 

By means of the speech processing system PRAAT developed by Boersma
(Institute of Phonetic Sciences) the mean fundamental frequency and the
harmonics-to-noise ratio have been analyzed. 

Pynchon registered a 9.0

We also ran it through the commercially available package
Multidimensional Voice Program (MDVP) which provides a series of
parameters that are grouped under fundamental frequency, frequency and
amplitude perturbation (jitter and shimmer), voice breaks, voice
irregularities, noise, and tremor. 

Pynchon registered a 9.0

Finally, a new parameter was used: duration of
voice onset of the sustained Long Island /a/; this is measured manually.
Results were compared with perceptual ratings (breathiness, roughness,
and tension) by trained raters. It appears that acoustical analyses
(especially standard deviation of the fundamental frequency, jitter,
noise, and duration of the
voice onset) show the same trend as was found for the perceptual
ratings, albeit less strong. However, given the direct single
correlation between acoustical and perceptual voice parameters, results
of multiple regression analyses show that a perceptual parameter can be
predicted better by a set of acoustical
measures and 
 the conclusion is 

Pynchon registered a 9.0

We're still looking into the  pitch analysis data.