Nonverbal vocalizations in dementia are important clinically since they generally have been regarded as disruptive behavior that is disturbing. The aim of the present study is to describe the interactional pattern, including the prosodic package, of nonverbal vocalizations in a participant in a late stage of dementia. The acoustic analysis shows that the vocalizations do not differ significantl...

This paper proposes a novel multi-layer approach to fundamental frequency modeling for concatenative speech synthesis based on a statistical learning technique called additive models. We define an additive F0 contour model consisting of long-term, intonational phrase-level, component and short-term, accentual phrase-level, component, along with a least-squares error criterion that includes a re...

Diachronic change has often been linked with synchronic instability and the realignment of phonological categories according to fine phonetic detail. For example, the development of tones in some languages is widely believed to have been the result of coarticulatory influences of onset obstruent voicing contrasts on the fundamental frequency (f0) of the following vowel. This is just one example...

This paper highlights the results of an investigation of several features across the style classes of the “simulated” portion of the SUSAS database. The features considered here include a recently-introduced measure of speaking rate called mrate, measures of shimmer, measures of jitter, and features derived from fundamental frequency (F0) contours. The F0 contour features are the means of F0 an...

A melodic pitch experiment was performed to demonstrate the importance of time-interval resolution for pitch strength. The experiments show that notes with a low fundamental (75 Hz) and relatively few resolved harmonics support better performance than comparable notes with a higher fundamental (300 Hz) and more resolved harmonics. Two four note melodies were presented to listeners and one note ...

Fundamental frequency (F0) extraction is often used in voice quality analysis. In pathological voices with a high degree of instability in F0, it is common for F0 extraction algorithms to fail. In such cases, the faulty F0 values might spoil the possibilities for further data analysis. This paper presents the correlogram, a new method of displaying periodicity. The correlogram is based on the w...

This paper presents a new method for robust fundamental frequency (F0) estimation in the presence of background noise and spectral distortion. We define degree of dominance and a dominance spectrum based on instantaneous frequencies. The degree of dominance allows us to evaluate the magnitude of individual harmonic components of speech signals relative to background noise while eliminating the ...

This paper presents a new method for robust fundamental frequency (F0) estimation in the presence of background noise and spectral distortion. We define degree of dominance and a dominance spectrum based on instantaneous frequencies. The degree of dominance allows us to evaluate the magnitude of individual harmonic components of speech signals relative to background noise while eliminating the ...

Four-band and single-band noise-excited vocoders were used in acoustic simulations to investigate spectral and temporal cues to melodic pitch in the output of a cochlear implant speech processor. Noise carriers were modulated by amplitude envelopes extracted by half-wave rectification and low-pass filtering at 32 or 400 Hz. The fourband, but not the single-band processors, may preserve spectral...

Acoustic analysis of voice quality proves useful in the objective assessment of voice disorders and for motivating new components for use in improving voice synthesis. A commonly used quantitative spectral index is the harmonicsto-noise ratio (HNR), which gives gross information regarding speech signal periodicity. However, as the measure is sensitive to all forms of waveform aperiodicities (no...