Speech sample salience analysis for speech cycle detection

The presentation proposes a method for the measurement of cycle lengths in voiced speech. The background is the study of acoustic cues of slow (vocal tremor) and fast (vocal jitter) perturbations of the vocal frequency. Here, these acoustic cues are obtained by means of a temporal method that detects speech cycles via the so-called salience of the speech signal samples. The method does not request that the signal is locally periodic and the average period length is known a priori. Several implementations are considered and discussed. Salience analysis is compared with the auto-correlation method for cycle detection implemented in Praat.