The voice is a multidimensional phenomenon that must be evaluated using special tools for determining acoustic parameters. These parameters are: the pitch or voice tone, the timbre, considered as the personality of the voice that is particular of each person (determined by fundamental frequency, its harmonics and formants) and the degree of hoarseness. During sustained vibration, the vocal fold...

Control over voice quality, e.g. breathy and tense voice, is important for speech synthesis applications. For example, transformations can be used to modify aspects of the voice related to speaker’s identity and to improve expressiveness. However, it is hard to modify voice characteristics of the synthetic speech, without degrading speech quality. State-of-the-art statistical speech synthesiser...

“Throaty” voice quality has been regarded by voice pedagogues as undesired and even harmful. The present study attempts to identify acoustic and physiological correlates of this quality. One male and one female subject read a text habitually and with a throaty voice quality. Oral pressure during p-occlusion was measured as an estimate of subglottic pressure. Long-term-average spectrum (LTAS) an...

cepstral features and features based on a bio–mechanical model of the visible articulators will be the identity–carrying characteristics extracted from acoustic speech and visual speech respectively. Speakers will be modelled by multi–layer perceptrons trained as discriminative models or, alternatively, as predictive models. In the discriminative modelling scheme, each speaker model will be tra...