Setup of an emotion recognition or emotional speech recognition system is directly related to how emotion changes the speech features. In this research, the influence of emotion on the anger and happiness was evaluated and the results were compared with the neutral speech. So the pitch frequency and the first three formant frequencies were used. The experimental results showed that there are lo...

Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VLTN), usually implemented as a frequency warping procedure (e.g. bilinear transformation), has been used successfully to adapt the spectral characteristics to a target speaker in speech recognition. In this study we exploit the same concept of frequency warping but concentrate explicitly on mapping the first four formant frequencies of 5 long vowels from sourc...

Formant frequencies, represented by major peaks in the spectrum of speech signals, convey important information about speech. The authors propose a method for detecting the formants of voiced speech through ‘instantaneous frequency’ (IF) estimation using a recursive least square (RLS) algorithm. The accuracy of the technique is assessed by comparing it with conventional formant detection techni...

The intelligibility of. unprocessed and of low-pass filtered speech was compared to that of speech processed using three versions of an all-harmonic code consisting of many harmonic sinusoids, a largest harmonic code consisting of four harmonic sinusoids closest o the formants, and a formant code consisting of three sinusoids scaled from the formant frequencies. Fundamental frequency and forman...

In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction pat...

Numerous attempts have been made to find low-dimensional, formant-related representations of speech signals that are suitable for automatic speech recognition. However, it is often not known how these features behave in comparison with true formants. The purpose of this study was to compare two sets of automatically extracted formant-like features, i.e., robust formants and HMM2 features, to ha...

Human speech and bird vocalization are complex communicative behaviors with notable similarities in development and underlying mechanisms. However, there is an important difference between humans and birds in the way vocal complexity is generally produced. Human speech originates from independent modulatory actions of a sound source, e.g., the vibrating vocal folds, and an acoustic filter, form...

The motor cortex and cerebellum are thought to be critical for learning and maintaining motor behaviors. Here we use transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to test the role of the motor cortex and cerebellum in sensorimotor learning in speech. During productions of "head," "bed," and "dead," the first formant of the vowel sound was altered in real time toward the first formant of the vo...