This work compares the accuracy of fundamental frequency and formant frequency estimation methods and maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction from MFCC vectors with hand-corrected references. Five fundamental frequency estimation methods are compared to fundamental frequency prediction from MFCC vectors in both clean and noisy speech. Similarly, three formant frequency estimation and prediction m...

In this paper, the amplitude and frequency AM–FM modulation model and a multiband demodulation analysis scheme are applied to formant frequency and bandwidth tracking of speech signals. Filtering by a bank of Gabor bandpass filters is performed to isolate each speech resonance in the signal. Next, the amplitude envelope AM and instantaneous frequency FM are estimated for each band using the ene...

Speech scientists have long proposed that formant exaggeration in infant-directed speech plays an important role in language acquisition. This event-related potential (ERP) study investigated neural coding of formant-exaggerated speech in 6-12-month-old infants. Two synthetic /i/ vowels were presented in alternating blocks to test the effects of formant exaggeration. ERP waveform analysis showe...

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, t...

Recent studies have shown that time-varying changes in formant pattern contribute to the phonetic specification of vowels. This variation could be especially important in children's vowels, because children have higher fundamental frequencies (f0's) than adults, and formant-frequency estimation is generally less reliable when f0 is high. To investigate the contribution of time-varying changes i...

To better understand how the auditory system extracts speech signals in the presence of noise, discrimination thresholds for the second formant frequency were predicted with simulations of auditory-nerve responses. These predictions employed either average-rate information or combined rate and timing information, and either populations of model fibers tuned across a wide range of frequencies or...

A multivariate-state HMM | an HMM with a vector state variable | can be used to nd jointly optimal phonetic and formant transcriptions of an utterance. The complexity of searching a multivariate state space using the BaumWelch algorithm is substantial, but may be signi cantly reduced if the formant frequencies are assumed to be conditionally independent given knowledge of the phone. Operating w...

A multivariat,e-state HMM an HMM with a vector state variable can be used to find jointly optimal phonetic and formant transcriptions of an utterance. The complexity of searching a multivariate state space using the BaumWelch algorithm is substantial, but may be significantly reduced if the formant frequencies are assumed to be conditionally independent given knowledge of the phone. Operating w...

This paper resumes an analysis of esophageal speech, and the developing of a method for improving its intelligibility through speech synthesis. Esophageal speech is characterized by low average frequency, while the formant patterns are found to be similar of those of normal speakers. The treatment is different for voiced and unvoiced frames of the signal. While the unvoiced frames are hold like...