This work proposes a novel method of predicting formant frequencies from a stream of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature vectors. Prediction is based on modelling the joint density of MFCCs and formant frequencies using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Using this GMM and an input MFCC vector, two maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction methods are developed. The first method predict...

A significant fact about speech perception is that intelligibility is preserved when the spectrum is shifted up or down along the frequency scale, across a fairly wide range. To study the relationship between fundamental frequency (F0) and spectrum envelope shifts in vowel perception, we used a high-quality vocoder (STRAIGHT) to process a set of vowels spoken by 3 adult males in /hVd/ context. ...

In our study we taught a female African Grey 11 Italian words: vowel-like sounds were extracted from comprehensible words after critical listening, and pitch frequency (Pkf) was measured for the first three formants of each vowel. Similarly, formants from human vowels were isolated and measured. The analysis run on formant frequencies mean values of both samples revealed that human vowels could...

Voiced sounds were simulated with a computer model of the vocal fold composed of a single mass vibrating both parallel and perpendicular to the airflow. The major improvement of the present model over the twomass model is that it has a wider continuous frequency range where self-excitation is possible both below and above the first formant frequency of the vocal tract. The two-dimensional model...

Formant bandwidth estimation is often observed to be more challenging than the estimation of formant center frequencies due to the presence of multiple glottal pulses within a period and short closed-phase durations. This study explores inherently different statistical properties between linear prediction (LP)-based estimates of formant frequencies and their corresponding bandwidths that may be...

Developmental trends of durational and spectral parameters of five American English diphthongs are investigated by age and gender. Specifically, diphthong durations, the fundamental frequency (F0), and the first three formant (F1, F2, F3) trajectories as well as formant transition rates are analyzed as a function of age, gender and diphthong type. In addition, the distance between diphthong ons...