The laryngeal motor cortex (LMC) is indispensible for the vocal motor control of speech and song production. Patients with bilateral lesions in this region are unable to speak and sing, although their nonverbal vocalizations, such as laughter and cry, are preserved. Despite the importance of the LMC in the control of voluntary voice production in humans, the literature describing its connection...

According to the source-filter model of speech production, speech can be represented by passing the excitation signal through the vocal tract filter. The epoch or instant of maximum excitation corresponds to the glottal closure instant. Several speech processing applications require robust epoch detection but this can be a difficult task. Although state-of-the-art epoch estimation methods can p...

Long-term voice outcomes of 13 tracheoesophageal speakers are assessed using speech samples that were recorded with at least 7 years in between. Intelligibility and voice quality are perceptually evaluated by 10 experienced speech and language pathologists. In addition, automatic speech evaluations are performed with tools from Ghent University. No significant group effect was found for changes...

one of the interesting topics on multimedia domain is concerned with empowering computer in order to speech production. speech synthesis is granting human abilities to the computer for speech production. data-based approach and process-based approach are the two main approaches on speech synthesis. each approach has its varied challenges. unit-selection speech synthesis and statistical parametr...

Speech is a vocalized form of human communication. Clarity of the voice is a major dependent factor for a good quality speech. It is necessary to have the means for measuring the clarity of the voice and train to improve it. In this paper, we describe the development of a system for measuring the speech quality through clarity of voice production. An Android system is built for the purpose wher...

Terms for voice quality or phonation types for use in normal speech often come from studies of pathological speech (laryngeal settings) and it is hard to describe voice quality, especially the variations of a normal voice. In normal speech we use different voice qualities both for linguistic distinctions in some languages, prosodically as a boundary signal, socially depending on social and regi...

Previous research has shown that the voice source is strongly correlated with speech quality [1][2][3]. However in many existing pitch modification algorithms only the impulse train excitation is modified, while the voice source is normally included in vocal tract transfer function and remains unchanged during modification. We present a production based pitch-scale modification scheme, which mo...

Unlike read or laboratory speech, spontaneous speech contains high rates of disfluencies (e.g., repetitions, repairs, filled pauses). Such events reflect production problems frequently encountered in everyday conversation. Analyses of American English show that disfluency affects a variety of phonetic aspects of speech, including segment durations, intonation, voice quality, vowel quality, and ...