Measuring the affective state of an individual across species with comparable non-invasive methods is a current challenge in animal communication research. This study aims to explore to which extent affect intensity is conveyed in the vocal behaviours of three nonhuman primate species (Campbell's monkeys, De Brazza's monkeys, red-capped mangabeys), which vary in body size, ecological niche and ...

Transcription-based studies have shown that tense stops appear before aspirated or lax stops in most Korean-acquiring children's speech. This order of mastery is predicted by the short lag Voice Onset Time (VOT) values of Korean tense stops, as this is the earliest acquired phonation type across languages. However, the tense stop also has greater motor demands than the other two phonation types...

Starting from Garcia’s definition, the historical evolution of the notion of vocal registers from then until now is considered. Even though much research has been carried out on vocal registers since then, the notion of registers is still confused in the singing voice community, and defined in many different ways. While some authors consider a vocal register as a totally laryngeal event, others...

Most of vocal and voice diseases cause changes in the voice. These diseases have to be diagnosed and treated during an early stage. There is an increased risk for vocal and voice diseases due to the modern way of life. Acoustic voice analysis is an effective and non-invasive tool due to: a) Objective support of the diagnostics. b) Screening the vocal and voice diseases and especially their earl...

In the last few years the number of systems and devices that use voice based interaction as grown significantly. For a daily use of such systems the interaction must be always pleasantness in order to provide an optimal user experience. In this paper we present a new automatic voice pleasantness classification system based on prosodic and acoustic patterns of voice preference. The classificatio...

SUMMARY The authors investigated whether acoustic speaking voice analyses can be used to predict the beginning of mutation in 21 male members of a professional boys' choir. Over a period of 3 years before mutation, children were examined every 3 months by ear, nose, and throat (ENT) and phoniatric specialists. At the same time, the voice was evaluated acoustically using analysis features of the...

Over the past several decades, many acoustic markers have been proposed to be sensitive to and measure overall voice quality. This meta-analysis presents a retrospective appraisal of scientific reports, which evaluated the relation between perceived overall voice quality and several acoustic-phonetic correlates. Twenty-five studies met the inclusion criteria and were evaluated using meta-analyt...

PURPOSE To compare the vocal self-perception and vocal complaints reported by two groups of students of the pedagogy course (freshmen and graduates); to relate the vocal self-perception to the vocal complaints for these groups; and to compare the voice quality of the students from these groups through perceptual auditory assessment and acoustic analysis. METHODS Initially, 89 students from th...

Whistler Text-to-Speech engine was designed so that we can automatically construct the model parameters from training data. This paper will focus on recent improvements on prosody and acoustic modeling, which are all derived through the use of probabilistic learning methods. Whistler can produce synthetic speech that sounds very natural and resembles the acoustic and prosodic characteristics of...