We describe an algorithm that automatically finds the smoothest formant trajectories for short segments of speech. The method selects for each segment the smoothest from a number of alternatives. The smoothness criterion is based on the modeling of formant tracks with polynomial functions and uses both the χ2 badness-of-fit as well as the variances of the polynomial coefficients. A great advant...

There exists no clear understanding of the importance of spectral tilt for perception of stop consonants. It is hypothesized that spectral tilt may be particularly salient when formant patterns are ambiguous or degraded. Here, it is demonstrated that relative change in spectral tilt over time, not absolute tilt, significantly influences perception of /b/ vs /d/. Experiments consisted of burstle...

Acoustic-phonetic approaches to forensic voice comparison often include analysis of vowel formants. Such methods typically depend on human-supervised formant measurement, which is often assumed to be relatively reliable and relatively robust to telephonetransmission-channel effects, but which requires substantial investment of human labor. Fully-automatic formant trackers require minimal human ...

The perceptual grouping of a four-tone cycle was studied as a function of differences in fundamental frequencies and the frequencies of spectral peaks. Each tone had a single formant and at least 13 harmonics. In Experiment 1 the formant was created by filtering a flat spectrum and in Experiment 2 by adding harmonics. Fundamental frequency was found to be capable of controlling grouping even wh...

The purpose of this study was to determine the accuracy with which listeners could identify the gender of a speaker from a synthesized isolated vowel based on the natural production of that speaker when (1) the fundamental frequency was consistent with the speaker's gender, (2) the fundamental frequency was inconsistent with the the speaker's gender, and (3) the speaker was transgendered. Ten m...

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...

The aim of the present study was to analyzed vowel and diphthong formant variation of a female patient diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) for 12 months using acoustic analysis. Monophthongs /a, i, u/ and diphthongs /h+ja+da/, /h+wi+da/, /h+ɰi+da/ were used for test. As the result of analysis, fundamental frequency and loudness declined with the progress of ALS characterized by d...

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare disorder characterized by the emergence of a perceived foreign accent following brain damage. The symptomotology, functional bases, and neural substrates of this disorder are still being elucidated. In this case study, acoustic analyses were performed on the speech of a 46-year old monolingual female who presented with FAS of unknown aetiology. The patien...

This paper proposes fusion and addition techniques of vocal tract features such as Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Dynamic Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (DMFCC) in speaker identification. Feature extraction plays an important role as a front end processing block in Speaker Identification (SI) process. Mel frequency features are used to extract the spectral characteristics o...

In this paper we study changes of the articulatory organs from young adulthood to old age. In particular, we focus on how the larynx and vocal folds age along with the rest of the body. The objective of the paper is to automatically compute the effects of vocal aging on fundamental frequency and the formants. We compare trends of the fundamental, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd formant frequencies as the age...