The Formant Comparison between Chinese Whispered and Voiced Vowels

In this paper, an improved dynamic programming (IDP) algorithm based on wild card mechanism and continuity constraint for the formant tracking is proposed, and the ratios of Chinese whispered to voiced formants are statistically analyzed. Experiments were performed on six Chinese simple blade vowels with four tones uttered by 20 speakers. The formant differences are quantified by the ratios of Chinese whispered to voiced formants. It is found that the whispered formants shift to higher frequencies and expand to wider bandwidths. On the other hand, the difference between F2 and F1 of four tones from the largest to the smallest is Tone 1, Tone 2, Tone 4 and Tone 3 in the whispered vowels. These results could be helpful to the research on the Chinese whispered speech conversion and recognition.