The vocal tract shape is crucial to voice production. Its lower part seems particularly relevant for voice timbre. This study analyzes the detailed morphology of parts of the epilaryngeal tube and the hypopharynx for the sustained German vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ by thirteen male singer subjects who were at the beginning of their academic singing studies. Analysis was based on two diff...

Speech constitutes much of the communicated information; most other perceived audio signals do not carry nearly as much information. Indeed, much of the non-speech signals maybe classified as ‘noise’ in human communication. The process of separating conversational speech and noise is termed voice activity detection (VAD). This paper describes a new approach to VAD which is based on the Wavelet ...

OBJECTIVES Verbal communication depends on a good function of voice and speech organs. Some of the voice characteristics of deaf people differ considerably from those of speakers with normal hearing. After cochlear implantation (CI), auditory control of voice production is possible and the quality of the voice is improved. CI improves quality of voice, speech and hearing with deafness. The aim ...

The families of nine children with deviant voice qualities were selected for family treatment according to the SYGESTI model. Recordings of the children's speech were made before and after therapy. Perceptual evaluation of their voice quality showed significant improvement in various perceptual parameters after the therapy. Acoustical analysis confirmed changes of voice quality and mean fundame...

Synthesised stimuli were used to investigate how two notionally separable dimensions of tone-of-voice – voice quality and fundamental frequency – are involved in the expression of affect. Listeners were presented with three series of stimuli: (1) stimuli exemplifying different voice qualities, (2) stimuli all with modal voice quality but with different affect-related f0 contours, and (3) stimul...

Voice quality has been defined as the characteristic auditory colouring of an individual's voice, derived from a variety of laryngeal and supralaryngeal features and running continuously through the individual's speech. The distinctive tone of speech sounds produced by a particular person yields a particular voice. Voice quality is at the centre of several speech processing issues. In speech re...

the speech is an easily accessible signal which clearly represents the characteristics of larynx and vocal folds. therefore, application of some proper machine learning algorithms on a small part of a recorded speech signal may help in non-invasive diagnosing of vocal fold diseases. since there are some experimental evidences that suggest the existence of chaotic behavior in speech production s...

Voice quality is recognized to play an important role for the rendering of emotions in verbal communication. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of a processing framework for voice transformations finalized to the analysis and synthesis of emotive speech. We use a GMM-based model to compute the differences between an MBROLA voice and an anger voice, and we address the modification of the...