This paper presents a new method for robust and accurate fundamental frequency (F0) estimation in the presence of background noise and spectral distortion. Degree of dominance and dominance spectrum are defined based on instantaneous frequencies. The degree of dominance allows one to evaluate the magnitude of individual harmonic components of the speech signals relative to background noise whil...

Measured in this study was the ability of eight hearing and five deaf subjects to identify the stress pattern in a short sentence from the variation in voice fundamental frequency (F0), when presented aurally (for hearing subjects) and when transformed into vibrotactile pulse frequency. Various transformations from F0 to pulse frequency were tested in an attempt to determine an optimum transfor...

Human speakers modulate the fundamental frequency (F0) of their utterances in order to express different 'prosodic' attitudes such as surprise or curiosity. How are these prosodic attitudes then decoded? The current research addresses the issue of how the temporal structure of F0 can be used in order to discriminate between prosodic attitudes in natural language using a temporal recurrent neura...

The goal of this paper is to investigate French word segmentation strategies using phonemic and lexical transcriptions as well as prosodic and part-of-speech annotations. Average fundamental frequency (f0) profiles and phoneme duration profiles are measured using 13 hours of broadcast news speech to study prosodic regularities of French words. Some influential factors are taken into considerati...

In the experiments reported here, perceived speaker identity was controlled by manipulating the fundamental frequency (F0) range of carrier phrases in which speech tokens were embedded. In the first experiment, words from two "hood"-"hud" continua were synthesized with different F0. The words were then embedded in synthetic carrier phrases with intonation contours which reduced perceived speake...

The purpose of this investigation was to study voice changes during a working day. The subjects consisted of 33 female primary and secondary schoolteachers who recorded their first and last lessons during one school day. The subjects were studied both as one group and two subgroups (those with many and those with few voice complaints). Estimates of fundamental frequency (F0), sound pressure lev...

Received 15 January 2007; revised 4 February 2008; accepted 7 February 2008 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 har...

The pitch of harmonic complex tones plays an important role in speech and music perception and the analysis of auditory scenes, yet traditional rate-place and temporal models for pitch processing provide only an incomplete description of the psychophysical data. To test physiologically a model based on spatiotemporal pitch cues created by the cochlear traveling wave (Shamma, 1985), we recorded ...

Mandarin is one of the tonal languages. In Mandarin tones, there are four lexical tones (tone 1 to tone 4) with four different fundamental frequency (f0), such as flat and high, rising, falling and then rising, and falling, respectively. In order to process signal on lexical tone, at first we have to identify which tone is. We would like to find out an efficient approach to identify Mandarin to...

This paper deals with the measure of importance of the prosodic features for automatic sentence modality recognition in French in real conditions. We start by analysing the problem of subjectivity of manual labeling of corpus. Then, we show the results of automatic sentence modality recognition by only two prosodic features: fundamental frequency (F0) and energy. The global accuracy (ACC) is no...