Voice quality variations include a set of voicing sound source modifications ranging from laryngealized to normal to breathy phonation. Analysis of reiterant imitations of two sentences by ten female and six male talkers has shown that the potential acoustic cues to this type of voice quality variation include: (1) increases to the relative amplitude of the fundamental frequency component as open quotient increases; (2) increases to the amount of aspiration noise that replaces higher frequency harmonics as the arytenoids become more separated; (3) increases to lower formant bandwidths; and (4) introduction of extra pole zeros in the vocal-tract transfer function associated with tracheal coupling. Perceptual validation of the relative importance of these cues for signaling a breathy voice quality has been accomplished using a new voicing source model for synthesis of more natural male and female voices. The new formant synthesizer, KLSYN88, is fully documented here. Results of the perception study indicate that, contrary to previous research which emphasizes the importance of increased amplitude of the fundamental component, aspiration noise is perceptually most important. Without its presence, increases to the fundamental component may induce the sensation of nasality in a high-pitched voice. Further results of the acoustic analysis include the observations that: (1) over the course of a sentence, the acoustic manifestations of breathiness vary considerably--tending to increase for unstressed syllables, in utterance-final syllables, and at the margins of voiceless consonants; (2) on average, females are more breathy than males, but there are very large differences between subjects within each gender; (3) many utterances appear to end in a "breathy-laryngealized" type of vibration; and (4) diplophonic irregularities in the timing of glottal periods occur frequently, especially at the end of an utterance. Diplophonia and other deviations from perfect periodicity may be important aspects of naturalness in synthesis.

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Analysis, synthesis, and perception of voice quality variations among female and male talkers

In this article the author proposes an episodic theory of spoken word representation, perception, and production. By most theories, idiosyncratic aspects of speech (voice details, ambient noise, etc.) are considered noise and are filtered in perception. However, episodic theories suggest that perceptual details are stored in memory and are integral to later perception. In this research the author tested an episodic model (MINERVA 2; D. L. Hintzman, 1986) against speech production data from a word-shadowing task. The model predicted the shadowing-response-time patterns, and it correctly predicted a tendency for shadowers to spontaneously imitate the acoustic patterns of words and nonwords. It also correctly predicted imitation strength as a function of "abstract" stimulus properties, such as word frequency. Taken together, the data and theory suggest that detailed episodes constitute the basic substrate of the mental lexicon. Early in the 20th century, Semon (1909/1923) described a memory theory that anticipated many aspects of contemporary theories (Schacter, Eich, & Tulving, 1978). In modem parlance, this was an episodic (or exemplar) theory, which assumes that every experience, such as perceiving a spoken word, leaves a unique memory trace. On presentation of a new word, all stored traces are activated, each according to its similarity to the stimulus. The most activated traces connect the new word to stored knowledge, the essence of recognition. The multiple-trace assumption allowed Semon's theory to explain the apparent permanence of specific memories; the challenge was also to create

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Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access.

The automatic conversion of English text to synthetic speech is presently being performed, remarkably well, by a number of laboratory systems and commercial devices. Progress in this area has been made possible by advances in linguistic theory, acoustic-phonetic characterization of English sound patterns, perceptual psychology, mathematical modeling of speech production, structured programming, and computer hardware design. This review traces the early work on the development of speech synthesizers, discovery of minimal acoustic cues for phonetic contrasts, evolution of phonemic rule programs, incorporation of prosodic rules, and formulation of techniques for text analysis. Examples of rules are used liberally to illustrate the state of the art. Many of the examples are taken from Klattalk, a text-to-speech system developed by the author. A number of scientific problems are identified that prevent current systems from achieving the goal of completely human-sounding speech. While the emphasis is on rule programs that drive a format synthesizer, alternatives such as articulatory synthesis and waveform concatenation are also reviewed. An extensive bibliography has been assembled to show both the breadth of synthesis activity and the wealth of phenomena covered by rules in the best of these programs. A recording of selected examples of the historical development of synthetic speech, enclosed as a 33 1/3-rpm record, is described in the Appendix.

Review of text‐to‐speech conversion for English

Most theories of spoken word identification assume that variable speech signals are matched to canonical representations in memory. To achieve this, idiosyncratic voice details are first normalized, allowing direct comparison of the input to the lexicon. This investigation assessed both explicit and implicit memory for spoken words as a function of speakers' voices, delays between study and test, and levels of processing. In 2 experiments, voice attributes of spoken words were clearly retained in memory. Moreover, listeners were sensitive to fine-grained similarity between 1st and 2nd presentations of different-voice words, but only when words were initially encoded at relatively shallow levels of processing. The results suggest that episodic memory traces of spoken words retain the surface details typically considered as noise in perceptual systems.

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Words and voices: episodic traces in spoken word identification and recognition memory.

The reliability of listeners’ ratings of voice quality is a central issue in voice research because of the clinical primacy of such ratings and because they are the standard against which other mea...

Perceptual Evaluation of Voice Quality

Average intelligibility scores for a group of 37 hearing-impaired and two normally hearing adolescents were determined by 50 normal listeners and were compared with nine acoustically measured speech variables. These nine variables included measurements of consonant production, vowel production, and prosody. Regression analysis of the variables showed that three of the speech variables bore a multiple correlation of 0.85 with measured intelligibility scores. Two variables alone, the mean voice-onset-time difference between /t/ and /d/ and the mean second-formant difference between /i/ and /c/, accounted for about 70% of the variance in the intelligibility scores. To cross-validate the reliability of these correlations, intelligibility scores were subsequently predicted for another group of 30 hearing-impaired adolescents and then compared with intelligibility scores as determined by another group of normal listeners. For this second group, the correlation between measured intelligibility scores and predicted scores was 0.86, which indicates that the reliability of the predicting variables is high. Five of the nine variables correlated more highly with measured speech intelligibility than did pure-tone audiometric thresholds. The average speech intelligibility of all 67 hearing-impaired subjects was 76%.

Toward Measuring How Well Hearing-Impaired Children Speak

A reflectionless metal tube which can act as a pseudoinfinite termination of the vocal tract was used to collect glottal volume‐velocity waveforms produced by 10 male and female adult subjects From each subject, glottal volume‐velocity samples were collected of normal, loud, and soft voice; falsetto and creaky voice; monosyllables with rising and falling intonation; and three‐syllable utterances containing primary lexical stress on one of the three syllables Analysis of the data indicates a wide variation of the glottal waveform shape, its rms intensity and fundamental frequency, phase spectrum, and intensity spectrum It is observed that as the fundamental frequency changes over time, the glottal source varies in one of two different ways In one type of change, the harmonic relations in the glottal spectrum become steeper as fundamental frequency rises In a different type of glottal‐wave change, relations between harmonics tend to remain the same despite a change in the fundamental frequency; the source spectrum in this case is simply shifted along the frequency and amplitude axes as a function of fundamental frequency To account for these variations in the glottal source, at least three factors must be known: the sex of the speaker, the voice register in which he phonates, and the linguistic context in which the phonation occurs

Study of variations in the male and female glottal wave.

Normal and reduced phonological space: the production of English vowels by deaf adolescents

The accuracy of spectrographic techniques and of linear prediction analysis in measuring formant frequencies is compared. The first three formant frequencies 90 synthetic speech tokens were measure...

The accuracy of formant frequency measurements: a comparison of spectrographic analysis and linear prediction.

Monosyllables were recorded from a group of 24 hearing-impaired and 6 normal-hearing children between three to six years of age. Tokens of the syllables /ba/ and /bo/ were placed on listening tapes...

Randall B. Monsen

Papers

Toward Measuring How Well Hearing-Impaired Children Speak

Study of variations in the male and female glottal wave.

Normal and reduced phonological space: the production of English vowels by deaf adolescents

The accuracy of formant frequency measurements: a comparison of spectrographic analysis and linear prediction.

Acoustic Qualities of Phonation in Young Hearing-Impaired Children