One of the fundamental problems in speech processing is removal of noise from the signal and extraction of important parameters such as the formant frequencies. We present a method that uses an auditory model and modulation Poisson rate estimation for formant estimation and removal of noise from a speech signal. A noisy speech signal is first put through an auditory model to generate a spike-se...

Effective monitoring of bulbar disease progression in persons with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) requires rapid, objective, automatic assessment of speech loss. The purpose of this work was to identify acoustic features that aid in predicting intelligibility loss and speaking rate decline in individuals with ALS. Features were derived from statistics of the first (F1) and second (F2) form...

167 and H1-H2 are significantly decreased while HRF is consistently increased. Hypo/Hyperarticulated Speech: For hyperarticulated voice, speech clarity tends to be maximized, while hypoarticulation refers to speech produced with minimal efforts. We have shown in [6] that the stronger the degree of articulation, the higher the glottal formant frequency, the maximum voiced frequency and the funda...

The exact pitch(fundamental frequency) extraction is important in speech signal processing like speech recognition, speech analysis and synthesis. However the exact pitch extraction from speech signal is very difficult due to the effect of formant and transitional amplitude. So in this paper, the pitch is detected after the elimination of formant ingredients by flattening the spectrum in freque...

The purpose of this study was to assess the preferences of undergraduate college student auditors (N = 139) with respect to a choral sound produced in an anechoic chamber that included a fully resonate singer’s formant and choral sound produced in the same chamber using a weaker singer’s formant resonance. An ensemble comprised of graduate voice students (N = 8) sang four choral music excerpts....

Realistic Voice Gender Conversion (VGC) requires independent scaling of the glottal (pitch) and vocal tract (formant) related features of the input speech signal. We present a VGC algorithm which has two novel features. Firstly, an efficient frequency scaling algorithm is presented. Secondly, we use this to scale all frequencies in the input signal by the desired formant scaling factor. We then...

This research examines parameters of drinking judgment by comparing sound characteristics before and after drinking using voice analysis. Until now, characteristics of drinkers are studied from perspectives of pitch, formant, and changes in size of sound, however, as these factors are very sensitive to environmental changes to be used as a measurer for judging drinking, it is important to find ...

Cochlear implants, like other types of auditory sensory aids, become increasingly ineffective with increasing ambient noise levels. One method of signal processing to reduce additive random wideband noise, the INTEL method, has been used to good effect as an input preprocessor for the Nucleus-22 cochlear implant. The implant's own signal processor estimates and encodes pitch frequency and the f...

Speech is one of the prevalent communication mediums for humans. Identifying the gender of a child speaker based on his/her speech is crucial in telecommunication and speech therapy. This article investigates the use of fundamental and formant frequencies from sustained vowel phonation to distinguish the gender of Malay children aged between 7 and 12 years. The Euclidean minimum distance and mu...

The aim of this paper is to present a new approach to spectral representation using sums of Gaussian distributions. Sums of Gaussians provide an intuitive representation for frequency bands of a signal spectrum as well as formant regions. The representation of spectral envelopes using Gaussian parameters {a, μ, σ} simplifies the expression of important tasks such as frequency warping and forman...