This paper explores the estimation and mapping of probability models of formant parameter vectors for voice conversion. The formant parameter vectors consist of the frequency, bandwidth and intensity of resonance at formants. Formant parameters are derived from the coefficients of a linear prediction (LP) model of speech. The formant distributions are modelled with phonemedependent two-dimensio...

In natural speech, there is a moderate correlation between the fundamental frequency and formant frequencies across talkers. The present study used a high-quality vocoder to manipulate these properties and determine their contribution to perceived naturalness and voice gender. The stimuli were re-synthesized sentences spoken by two adult males and two adult females. Scale factors were chosen fo...

This paper presents a novel approach to integration of formant frequency and conventional MFCC data in phone recognition experiments on TIMIT. Naive use of format data introduces classification errors if formant frequency estimates are poor, resulting in a net drop in performance. However, by exploiting a measure of confidence in the formant frequency estimates, formant data can contribute to c...

In this paper we consider the estimation and mapping of timevarying formant model parameters and orders for voice transformation. The model order is the number of perceptually significant formant trajectories estimated from an analysis of the poles of “over-modelled’’ linear prediction models of the source and target speech. A 2-D HMM with NF left–to-right states across frequency and M states a...

The goal of this study was to measure the ability of adult hearing-impaired listeners to discriminate formant frequency for vowels in isolation, syllables, and sentences. Vowel formant discrimination for F1 and F2 for the vowels /I epsilon ae / was measured. Four experimental factors were manipulated including linguistic context (isolated vowels, syllables, and sentences), signal level (70 and ...

The objective of this paper is to present a formant frequency estimation method, developed with a view to track small variations due to involuntary vocal tract movement. The formant frequency estimation is based on the instantaneous frequencies obtained by means of a complex wavelet transform and is synchronised with the glottal cycle. Results for synthetic speech signals show the precision of ...

Experiments were conducted to determine the extent to which a fundamental frequency or formant frequency transition influenced segregation of a simultaneous pair of single-formant harmonic complexes. Results showed that even a minute transition facilitated segregation. The effect was larger for formant frequency than fundamental frequency transitions. It is concluded that dynamic aspects of spe...