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...

BACKGROUND Models of honest advertisement predict that sexually selected calls should signal male quality. In most vertebrates, high quality males have larger body sizes that determine higher social status and in turn higher reproductive success. Previous research has emphasised the importance of vocal tract resonances or formant frequencies of calls as cues to body size in mammals. However, th...

This work proposes a novel method of predicting formant frequencies from a stream of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature vectors. Prediction is based on modelling the joint density of MFCC vectors and formant vectors using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Using this GMM and an input MFCC vector, two maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction methods are developed. The first method pred...