The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. This paper presents the design, analysis and experimental testing of a variable-pitch quadrotor. A custom in-lab built quadrotor with on-board attitude stabilization is developed and tested. An analysis of the dynamic differences in thrust output between a fixed-pitch and varia...

Pitch marking is very significant in speech signal processing. In a text-to-speech (TTS) system based on the Time-Domain Pitch-Synchronous Overlap-Add (TD-PSOLA) method, robust estimation of pitch marks (PM) is especially important to the modification of the time and pitch scale of a speech signal in order to match it to that of the target speaker. The aim of this paper is to improve the accura...

This study investigated global versus local pitch pattern perception in children with dyslexia aged between 8 and 11 years. Children listened to two consecutive 4-tone pitch sequences while performing a same/different task. On the different trials, sequences either preserved the contour (local condition) or they violated the contour (global condition). Compared to normally developing children, ...

We compared pitch patterns of Japanese intonational phrases spoken by a native speaker of Chinese. Several types of pitch errors were distinguished according to pitch contour shapes within and across intonational phrases. These shapes differ categorically from one another—for instance, the learner uses flat contours while the native uses hump-like contours. Comparisons of the learner and native...

In this paper, a generic pitch marks filtering algorithm (PMFA) is introduced in order to achieve reliable and smooth pitch marks from any input pitch tracking or marking algorithm. The proposed PMFA is a simple yet effective filtering process based on restricted dynamic programming, but very helpful for minimizing human intervention when creating large speech corpora. Moreover, this work intro...

This paper proposes a new technique for detecting pitch patterns which is useful for automatic speech recognition, by using a narrow band spectrum analysis. The motivation of this approach is that humans perceive some kind of pitch in whispers where no fundamental frequencies can be observed, while most of the pitch determination algorithm (PDA) fails to detect such perceptual pitch. The narrow...

Relative pitch perception is the identification of the relationship between two successive pitches without identifying the pitches themselves. Absolute pitch perception is the identification of the pitch of a single note without relating it to another note. To date, most pitch algorithms have concentrated on detecting the absolute pitch of a signal. This paper presents an approach for relative ...

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder affecting the processing of pitch. This pitch deficit can be traced down to abnormal brain responses elicited by pitch changes smaller than a semitone in conditions requiring attention. Here, we use the mismatch negativity (MMN) to investigate pre-attentive pitch change detection in 10 amusics and eight matched controls. Results indicate similar MMN in a...

This study presents the results of a large-scale comparison of various measures of pitch range and pitch variation in two Slavic (Bulgarian and Polish) and two Germanic (German and British English) languages. The productions of twenty-two speakers per language (eleven male and eleven female) in two different tasks (read passages and number sets) are compared. Significant differences between the...