This paper presents two techniques of formants estimation based on LPC and cepstral analysis. These methods are implemented with Matlab and applied to the problem of accurate measurement of formant frequencies. The first algorithm estimate formant frequencies from the all pole model of the vocal tract transfer function. The approach relies on the source – filter model supposing that the speech ...

The objective of this paper is to present a formant frequency estimation method, developed with a view to track small variations due to involuntary vocal tract movement. The formant frequency estimation is based on the instantaneous frequencies obtained by means of a complex wavelet transform and is synchronised with the glottal cycle. Results for synthetic speech signals show the precision of ...

This paper presents the results of psychophysical experiments dealing with pitch-marker positioning within the Pitch Synchronous OverLap and Add (PSOLA) framework. Sustained natural vowels were PSOLAmodified in fundamental frequency. The experiments were aimed at determining the auditory sensitivity to (1) deterministic shifts of either all or single pitch markers within a sequence, and (2) ran...

The purpose of this study was to examine the acoustic characteristics of children's speech and voices that account for listeners' ability to identify gender. In Experiment I, vocal recordings and gross physical measurements of 4-, 8-, 12-, and 16-year olds were taken (10 girls and 10 boys per age group). The speech sample consisted of seven nondiphthongal vowels of American English (/ae/ "had,"...

The paper investigates the developmental change in formant frequencies (F1F2) of the vowels [i u ɛ ɔ a] in Cantonese male and female children of the ages ranging from 4 to 12. Results show that (i) a decrease in formant frequencies and vowel loop area is a function of age and the change is a gradual process; (ii) the developmental change with age is non-uniform across vowel types and formants, ...

The present study examined the possible relationship between classification of professional singing voices and their vocal tract parameters including vocal tract length and volume, and vowel formant frequencies. Acoustic reflection technology (ART) was used to measure vocal tract length and volume of 107 professional singers: 32 tenors, 25 baritones, 27 sopranos, and 23 mezzo-sopranos. The firs...

A multivariate-state HMM | an HMM with a vector state variable | can be used to nd jointly optimal phonetic and formant transcriptions of an utterance. The complexity of searching a multivariate state space using the BaumWelch algorithm is substantial, but may be signi cantly reduced if the formant frequencies are assumed to be conditionally independent given knowledge of the phone. Operating w...

A multivariat,e-state HMM an HMM with a vector state variable can be used to find jointly optimal phonetic and formant transcriptions of an utterance. The complexity of searching a multivariate state space using the BaumWelch algorithm is substantial, but may be significantly reduced if the formant frequencies are assumed to be conditionally independent given knowledge of the phone. Operating w...

The differences between the formant trajectories of British and broad Australian English accents are analysed and used for accent conversion. An improved formant model based on linear prediction (LP) feature analysis and a 2-D hidden Markov model (HMM) of formants is employed for estimation of the formant trajectories of vowels and diphthongs. Comparative analysis of the formant values, the for...