The effects of age, sex, and vocal tract configuration on the glottal excitation signal in speech are only partially understood, yet understanding these effects is important for both recognition and synthesis of speech as well as for medical purposes. In this paper, three acoustic measures related to the voice source are analyzed for five vowels from 3145 CVC utterances spoken by 335 talkers (8-39 years old) from the CID database [Miller et al., Proceedings of ICASSP, 1996, Vol. 2, pp. 849-852]. The measures are: the fundamental frequency (F0), the difference between the "corrected" (denoted by an asterisk) first two spectral harmonic magnitudes, H1* - H2* (related to the open quotient), and the difference between the "corrected" magnitudes of the first spectral harmonic and that of the third formant peak, H1* - A3* (related to source spectral tilt). The correction refers to compensating for the influence of formant frequencies on spectral magnitude estimation. Experimental results show that the three acoustic measures are dependent to varying degrees on age and vowel. Age dependencies are more prominent for male talkers, while vowel dependencies are more prominent for female talkers suggesting a greater vocal tract-source interaction. All talkers show a dependency of F0 on sex and on F3, and of H1* - A3* on vowel type. For low-pitched talkers (F0 < or = 175 Hz), H1* - H2* is positively correlated with F0 while for high-pitched talkers, H1* - H2* is dependent on F1 or vowel height. For high-pitched talkers there were no significant sex dependencies of H1* - H2* and H1* - A3*. The statistical significance of these results is shown.

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Age, sex, and vowel dependencies of acoustic measures related to the voice source.

The object of this book is to prepare a comprehensive but elementary book on speech science that fills the need for a text that is easy to understand, but successfully integrates the basic material on production, acoustics, and perception of speech. The book deals with the linkage between speech, language, and thought, and profiles the contributions of several pioneers in the field of speech science. The authors have included a chapter on the evolution of language and speech that provides provocative postulates of interest. There is also a nice review of the research tools currently in use in speech science laboratories. Of greatest interest to otolaryngologists are the three sections that deal with acoustics, speech production, and speech perception. The authors are experts in these areas and have provided a succinct and lucid review of the concepts that are central to these fields. The book is available in soft-cover and

Speech Science Primer: Physiology, Acoustics, and Perception of Speech

The automatic parametrization of the first derivative of glottal flow is studied. Representatives of the two types of methods used most often for parametrization were tested and compared. The chosen representatives are all based on the Liljencrants–Fant model. As numerous tests were needed for a detailed comparison of the methods, a novel evaluation procedure is used which consists of the following stages: (1) use the Liljencrants–Fant model to generate synthetic flow pulses; (2) estimate voice source parameters for these synthetic flow pulses; and (3) calculate the errors by comparing the estimated values with the input values of the parameters. This evaluation procedure revealed that in order to reduce the average error in the estimated voice source parameters, the estimation methods should be able to estimate noninteger values of these parameters. The proposed evaluation method was also used to study the influence of low-pass filtering on the estimated voice source parameters. It turned out that low-pass filtering causes an error in all estimated voice source parameters. On average, the smallest errors were found for a parametrization method in which a voice source model is fitted to the flow derivative, and in which the voice source model is low-pass filtered with the same filter as the flow derivative.

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Automatic parametrization of differentiated glottal flow: Comparing methods by means of synthetic flow pulses

The effects of age, gender, and vocal tract configurations on the glottal excitation signal are still only partially understood. In this paper we examine some of these effects, and show that the voice source parameters, such as fundamental frequency (Fo), open quotient (related to H*1 - H*2), and spectral tilt (related to H*1 - A*3) are not only affected by age and gender but are also intercorrelated (the asterisk superscript denotes correction for the influence of various formants). Recordings of 92 male and female speakers from three age groups (8, 15, 20-39) are analyzed. The main observations are: for low-pitched talkers H*1 - H* 2 (hence, the open quotient) is proportional to Fo, while for high-pitched talkers H*1 $H*2 is proportional to F1 (high to low vowels) for F1 < 700 Hz. The parameter H*1 - A*3 showed a strong dependence on F2 and F3 for all talkers and age groups: increasing F2 or F3 yielded an increase in H*1 - A*3. Spectral tilt was seen to be vowel dependent and for male talkers, spectral tilt changed dramatically with age. A better understanding of the dependencies of voice source parameters on age and gender will help improve voice source parameter estimation and analysis for a variety of speech processing and medical applications

/pdf/age-and-gender-dependent-analysis-of-voice-source-2gmkwnu9wt.pdf

Age-and Gender-Dependent Analysis of Voice Source Characteristics

In this paper, we examine the dependencies of voice source parameters F0(fundamental frequency), Ee(maximal glottal flow change), RK(glottal symmetry/skew), LIN (value related to source spectral tilt) and H∗ 1 −H∗ 2 (difference of formant-corrected magnitudes of the first two source spectral harmonics) on prosodic features such as pitch accents, stress, and sentence type and the interdependencies of some of these measures. A small, carefully designed corpus containing a sentence in different prosodic configurations was used in this study. Statistical analysis was performed using two-way ANOVAs to test for the voice source parameter dependencies. Results show that F0 is positively correlated with Ee and LIN , and negatively correlated with H∗ 1−H 2 . Stressed syllables showed lower values of RK and H∗ 1−H 2 compared to stressless syllables. The effect of pitch accent can be seen as a combination of its F0, and stress. Phrase-final syllables for interrogative sentences yielded a higher F0 and lower RK and H∗ 1 −H∗ 2 compared to declarative sentences. It was found that it is important to differentiate between tones when analyzing prosodic features that involve tones, such as pitch accent and probably boundary.

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J.J.M. Koreman

Papers

Decoding linguistic information in the glottal airflow