Variation of Pitch and Formants in Different Age Group

This paper addresses effects of age on certain acoustic properties of speech. Each human being goes through the process of ageing. Our voices and speech patterns changes from early childhood to old age. We examined there is difference in vowel acoustics between older and younger adults, possibly related to age-related changes in vocal tract morphology. In fact, younger children show higher phone duration and larger spectral and temporal variability than older children and adults. Analysis of vowel transition and the amount of spectral difference between vowels are clearly age-dependent. Younger children, in fact, show shorter transition duration and larger spectral difference in vowel. The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in variability of several measures of the speech produced by the adult female and child. The speech of female (child aged between 5-15 years, younger aged between 20-45 years, older aged between 50-85 years) was evaluated for identification of differences for age group across measure of fundamental and formant frequencies. A strong correlation between age and accuracy was found. In our study we have proved fundamental frequency decreases according to our age. Results show that older adults had overall lower frequency formants, and qualitatively different shaped vowel spaces, than the younger adults. Female has high pitch for younger age group and low pitch for old age group. It is well known that acoustic and linguistic characteristics of children's speech are widely different from those of adult speech. Furthermore, characteristics of children's speech vary rapidly as a function of age due to the anatomical and physiological changes occurring during a child's growth and because children become more skilled in co-articulation with age. Much has been done in the past in analyzing the acoustic differences between children's and adult speech, with a particular focus on vocal tract length and its influences on pitch and formant frequency values, understanding the developmental changes in children's speech can help devise strategies for dealing with the acoustic mismatch between different age group. The acoustic characteristics of the glottal excitation signals have been shown to be gender dependent and are believed to change with age. A better understanding of these age and gender dependencies will help improve voice source estimation and analysis for a variety of speech processing. In this paper, our main concern is with the effect of increasing age during the life span of an adult speaker on formant frequencies. Our interest …