The speech intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese sentences of various spectral regions, regarding band-stop conditions (one or two “holes” in the spectrum), was investigated through subjective listening tests. Results demonstrated significant effects on Mandarin Chinese sentence intelligibilities when a single or a pair of spectral holes was introduced. Meanwhile, it revealed the importance of th...

Formant frequencies were determined from vocalic utterances of a prelinguistically deafened child implanted with a Nucleus 22-channel device at age 5 years. Speech samples were obtained from recordings of speech made 5 and 2 months prior to implantation and at 6, 12, 18, 24, and 36 months post implantation. Prior to implantation, first formant values showed a greater range than those of normal ...

This paper concerns Multiple-level Segmental HiddenMarkov Models (M-SHMMs) in which the relationship between symbolic and acoustic representations of speech is regulated by a formant-based intermediate representation. New TIMIT phone recognition results are presented, confirming that the theoretical upper-bound on performance is achieved provided that either the intermediate representation or t...

For speech synthesizers, enhanced diversity and improved quality of synthesized speech are required. Speaker interpolation and voice conversion are the techniques that enhance diversity. The PUSF (plural unit selection and fusion) method, which we have proposed, generates synthesized waveforms using pitchcycle waveforms. However, it is difficult to modify its spectral features while keeping nat...

In this paper we present a new formant tracking algorithm where the formant frequencies estimation was based on local maxima detection of a time frequency representation. This representation can be shown by a scalogram issued from a complex wavelet transform. The formant frequency candidates are validated as local maxima of scalogram which correspond to wavelet ridges. Then in the proposed algo...

Current melody extraction approaches perform poorly on the genre of opera [1, 2]. The singer’s formant is defined as a prominent spectral-envelope peak around 3 kHz found in the singing of professional Western opera singers [3]. In this paper we introduce a novel melody extraction algorithm based on this feature for opera signals. At the front end, it automatically detects the singer’s formant ...

Perceptual and neurophysiological enhancements in linguistic processing in musicians suggest that domain specific experience may enhance neural resources recruited for language specific behaviors. In everyday situations, listeners are faced with extracting speech signals in degraded listening conditions. Here, we examine whether musical training provides resilience to the degradative effects of...

This paper examines four acoustic correlates of vowel identity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP): first formant (F1), second formant (F2), duration, and fundamental frequency (F0). Both varieties of Portuguese display some cross-linguistically common phenomena: vowel-intrinsic duration, vowel-intrinsic pitch, gender-dependent size of the vowel space, gender-dependent dur...

Posh accent in British English is associated with upper class. Previous research on poshness has been centred on vocabulary, grammar and phonology, but little is known about the phonetic properties. This study, as part of a larger project, is an attempt to connect posh accent with attractiveness of voice through a common set of dimensions originating from emotional prosody research. Using Vocal...