This paper examines the role that a change in phonation and a slight contour in fundamental frequency (f0) have for the perception of the three phonologically level tones in the Fuzhou variety of Chinese. An experiment was devised whereby synthetic tokens with modified f0 heights were included among natural tokens and presented to native listeners who were asked to identify specific words from ...

This study investigated the interaction between the laryngeal and the supralaryngeal systems via acoustic analysis of intrinsic pitch in Mandarin, a tonal language that uses fundamental frequency (F0) as a linguistic unit. The F0, F1, and F2 of three Mandarin vowels /i,u,a/ at all four Mandarin lexical tones for 10 participants were analyzed. Results show that intrinsic pitch is more noticeable...

We present a novel stochastic model of singing voice fundamental frequency (F0) contours for characterizing expressive dynamic components, such as vibrato and portamento. Although dynamic components can be important features for any singing voice applications, modeling and extracting these components from a raw F0 contour have yet to be accomplished. Therefore, we describe a process for generat...

This paper proposes a conceptually simple and computationally efficient fundamental frequency (F0) estimator for polyphonic music signals. The studied class of estimators calculate the salience, or strength, of a F0 candidate as a weighted sum of the amplitudes of its harmonic partials. A mapping from the Fourier spectrum to a “F0 salience spectrum” is found by optimization using generated trai...

Understanding and managing tonal characteristics of Vietnamese language is one of the most difficult aspects in Vietnamese speech processing. However, at present, there is no common agreement about the influence of fundamental frequency (F0) on the perception of Vietnamese syllables. Thus, instead of analyzing the F0 of a limited number of Vietnamese syllables like other methods found in litera...

Studies of the relationship between prosody and the topic structure of longer discourses have tended to focus on intonational cues, most specifically fundamental frequency (F0). However, this may limit the kinds of topic structure it is possible to identify. A case study of two speakers shows that including speech rate along with F0 factors in an analysis of the prosody of topic structure can b...

We formerly conducted emotional speech synthesis using our corpus-based method of generating fundamental frequency (F0) contours from text. The method predicts command values of F0 contour generation process model instead of directly predicting F0 value of each time frame. A better control of F0 contours was realized by taking the emotional level of each bunsetsu into account: adding informatio...

This paper investigates the influence of a dynamic fundamental frequency (F0) on the perception of vowel duration. The perception of vowel duration of the vowels [a], [e], and [i] with a falling versus a level F0 was investigated. Native speakers of Thai, Japanese, German, and Latin American Spanish were presented with monosyllabic CV non-sense words, and their perception of the duration of vow...

The aim of this study was to explore the prosodic characteristics of speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD) in the marking of intonations. Twenty-four German PD speakers with either mild or moderate degree of dysarthria were compared with twelve non-dysarthric control speakers on the production of imperatives, questions and statements. Acoustic analyses of fundamental frequency (average F0, F0 ...

The addition of low-passed (LP) speech or even a tone following the fundamental frequency (F0) of speech has been shown to benefit speech recognition for cochlear implant (CI) users with residual acoustic hearing. The mechanisms underlying this benefit are still unclear. In this study, eight bimodal subjects (CI users with acoustic hearing in the non-implanted ear) and eight simulated bimodal s...