Fundamental frequency (F0, broadly “pitch”) is an integral part of spoken human language; however, a comprehensive quantitative model for F0 can be a challenge to formulate due to the large number of effects and interactions between effects that lie behind the human voice’s production of F0, and the very nature of the data being a contour rather than a point. This paper presents a semi-parametr...

The Northern and Western dialects of the Mon-Khmer language Kammu use fundamental frequency to distinguish words, while the Eastern dialect relies on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which display an F0 contrast in the other dialects. The production and perception of tones in the three dialects is investigated, using recordings and perception tests. As expected...

The pitch dependency of timbres has not been fully exploited in musical instrument identification. In this paper, we present a method using an F0-dependent multivariate normal distribution of which mean is represented by a function of fundamental frequency (F0). This F0-dependent mean function represents the pitch dependency of each feature, while the F0-normalized covariance represents the non...

Evidence for speech-specific brain processes has been searched for through the manipulation of formant frequencies which mediate phonetic content and which are, in evolutionary terms, relatively "new" aspects of speech. Here we used whole-head magnetoencephalography and advanced stimulus reproduction methodology to examine the contribution of the fundamental frequency F0 and its harmonic intege...

A corpus-based method of generating fundamental frequency (F0) contours of various speaking styles from text was developed. Instead of directly predicting F0 values, the method predicts command values of the F0 contour generation process model. Because of the model constraint, the resulting F0 contour keeps certain naturalness even when the prediction is done incorrectly. The method includes a ...

We describe an illusion in which a stranger's voice, when presented as the auditory concomitant of a participant's own speech, is perceived as a modified version of their own voice. When the congruence between utterance and feedback breaks down, the illusion is also broken. Compared to a baseline condition in which participants heard their own voice as feedback, hearing a stranger's voice induc...

We have formerly proposed a statistical model of moraic transitions of fundamental frequency (F0) contours and showed its e ectiveness for prosodic boundary detection and accent type recognition. This model represented F0 contours of prosodic words to simultaneously detect and recognize prosodic word boundaries and accent types. This paper proposes a method where prosodic word F0 contours are m...

The present study investigates the contribution of fundamental frequency (F0) in native English and native French listeners‟ segmentation of French speech. The results of a word-monitoring task with resynthesized stimuli show that pitch accents modulated speech segmentation for both groups, but unlike native listeners, the English listeners, who were at mid and high proficiencies in French, wer...

Voice fundamental frequency (F0) determines the tonal quality of vowels, and its rise and fall comprise part of prosody in speech. This seemingly simple linear function results from highly complex physiological factors and thus lacks definitive explanations of the causal mechanisms. This report reviews previous studies and recent discoveries regarding the causal factors of F0 patterns and discu...

Human infant crying has been researched as a non-invasive tool for assessing neurophysiological states at an early developmental stage. Little is known about the acoustic features of spontaneous cries in preterm infants, although their pain-induced cries are at a higher fundamental frequency (F0) before term-equivalent age. In this study, we investigated the effects of gestational age, body siz...