Perceived voice quality is a key metric in VoIP applications. The quality is mainly affected by IP network impairments such as delay, jitter and packet loss. Playout buffer at the receiving end can be used to compensate for the effects of jitter based on a tradeoff between delay and loss. Adaptive smoothing algorithms are capable of adjusting dynamically the smoothing time based on the network ...

Plasticity of voice quality is defined here as the degree of improvement in deviant voice quality that can be achieved immediately or quasi-immediately by changing basic voicing conditions, posture, articulation or resonance, breathing mechanics, laryngeal position, or auditory feedback. Thirty-two adult patients with various benign organic voice pathologies, and who had a (preoperative) functi...

Voice quality conveys both linguistic and paralinguistic information, and can be distinguished by acoustic source characteristics. We label objective voice quality categories based on the harmonic structure (H1-H2) and the mean autocorrelation ratio of each phone. Results from a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification experiment show that these features are predictive of Perceptual Linear P...

This study begins to explore the importance of the physiological domain in voice transformation. A general approach is outlined for transforming the voice quality of sentence-level speech while maintaining the same phonetic content. Transformations will eventually include gender, age, voice quality, emotional state, disordered state, dialect or impersonation. In this paper, only a specific voic...

Performers use various laryngeal settings to create voices for characters and personas they portray. Although some research demonstrates the sociophonetic associations of laryngeal voice quality, few studies have documented or examined the role of harsh voice quality, particularly with vibration of the epilaryngeal structures (growling). This article qualitatively examines phonetic properties o...

This paper describes novel voice quality control of synthetic speech using cluster adaptive training (CAT). In this method, we model voice quality factors labeled with perceptual expressions such as “Gender,” “Age” and “Brightness.” In advance, we obtain the intensity scores of the perceptual expressions by conducting a listening test, which evaluates differences of voice qualities between synt...

This paper proposes a two-layer model of the information carried in the speech signal. It attempts to define the role of prosody with a wider scope than has previously been considered in speech synthesis or linguistic research, by taking into account affective information in addition to that of linguistic content. The work is based on analysis of a large corpus of spontaneous conversational spe...

Pleasant singing voice is often ornamented by vibrato. This pitch fluctuation acts as a distinctive feature for singing and promotes voice quality. Nevertheless, independent pitch processing in singing voice synthesis does not guarantee the output quality. The spectral envelope actually varies with pitch during human voice production. This paper proposes a modeling technique for singers’ vibrat...

Prominence relations in speech are signaled by various ways including such phonetic means as voice fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. A less studied acoustic feature affecting prominence is the so called voice quality which is determined by changes in the airflow caused by different laryngeal settings. We investigated the changes in voice quality with respect to linguistic prosodic...

The duration of three infants’ vocalisations were examined during a six-month longitudinal study. In contrast to most other infant research, this study included in its analysis all vocalisations including those deemed vegetative or those having nonmodal voice quality. All three infants produced vocalisations which decreased in duration in the initial months. However between the 3rd and 5th mont...