Research indicates that, when the first and second formants of a vowel are separated by less than about 3.5 Bark, perception of its height and some other aspects of its quality is determined by some weighted average of the low-frequency spectrum, rather than by particular harmonic or hypothetical formant frequencies (as is the case with more widely spaced formants). This spectral averaging has ...

Formant frequencies have rarely been used as acoustic features for speech recognition, in spite of their phonetic significance. For some speech sounds one or more of the formants may be so badly defined that it is not useful to attempt a frequency measurement. Also, it is often difficult to decide which formant labels to attach to particular spectral peaks. This paper describes a new method of ...

The traditional approaches for formant frequency estimation are misled by spectral peaks in unvoiced speech and perform very poorly in transient background noise. Also, these traditional algorithms are not robust in real life noise environment and are unable to recover quickly after periods of silence. Robust formant tracking algorithm is discussed. Testing of the algorithm using various speech...

This paper describes how formant frequencies of voiced and unvoiced speech can be predicted from mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) vectors using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation within a hidden Markov model (HMM) framework. Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are used to model the local joint density of MFCCs and formant frequencies. More localised prediction is achieved by modelling s...

We use the lossy electric transmission—line analog model of the vocal tract to study the acoustics of speech produced in a hyperbaric helium— oxygen atmosphere. The analysis extends previous work by including more completely the effects of the wall vibration, glottal, and radiation impedances, and by analyzing the formant bandwidths and amplitudes in addition to the formant frequencies. It show...

A method is proposed to model the interspeaker variability of formant patterns for oral vowels. It is assumed that this variability originates in the differences existing among speakers in the respective lengths of their front and back vocal-tract cavities. In order to characterize, from the spectral description of the acoustic speech signal, these vocal-tract differences between speakers, each...

In this master thesis, the formant frequencies of an excellent male Swedish barbershop quartet were examined. The choice of topic was based on several factors that ought to make the tuning of the formant frequencies extremely important in the strive for the characteristic barbershop sound. The quartet was recorded, singing parts of the song 'Paper Moon'. In the recordings, each singer had an in...