This paper addresses effects of age on certain acoustic properties of speech. Each human being goes through the process of ageing. Our voices and speech patterns changes from early childhood to old age. We examined there is difference in vowel acoustics between older and younger adults, possibly related to age-related changes in vocal tract morphology. In fact, younger children show higher phon...

We can recognize the melody of a familiar song when it is played on different musical instruments. Similarly, an animal must be able to recognize a warning call whether the caller has a high-pitched female or a lower-pitched male voice, and whether they are sitting in a tree to the left or right. This type of perceptual invariance to "nuisance" parameters comes easily to listeners, but it is un...

This paper describes a new method for estimating formant frequencies. It operates in two phases. The first phase, which is similar to a technique developed by Talkin [JASA, vol. 82, S1], finds optimal formant track estimates by imposing frequency continuity constraints using Dynamic Programming (DP). DP is used to select a mapping of candidate frequencies to formant frequencies in oral sonorant...

This paper presents duration and formant data for the central vowels /@/ (schwa) and /a/ in Arrernte, a central Australian language. Results show that /@/ has a shorter duration and higher position in the vowel space in metrically prominent syllables, whereas /a/ has a longer duration and no change in formant structure. By contrast, effects of pitch accent are minimal for both vowels.

In this paper we propose a scheme for developing a voice conversion system that converts the speech signal uttered by a source speaker to a speech signal having the voice characteristics of the target speaker. In particular, we address the issue of transformation of the vocal tract system features from one speaker to another. Formants are used to represent the vocal tract system features and a ...

This article presents two experiments dealing with a psychoacoustical evaluation of the pitch-synchronous overlap-and-add (PSOLA) technique. This technique has been developed for modification of duration and fundamental frequency of speech and is based on simple waveform manipulations. Both experiments were aimed at deriving the sensitivity of the auditory system to the basic distortions introd...

A joint analysis-synthesis framework is developed for the compressive sensing (CS) recovery of speech signals. The signal is assumed to be sparse in the residual domain with the linear prediction filter used as the sparse transformation. Importantly this transform is not known apriori, since estimating the predictor filter requires the knowledge of the signal. Two prediction filters, one comb f...

Spectra of vowels sung a t identical pitches by two tenor voices and two alto voices a r e compared. The formant frequencies and the source spectra a r e studied by matching the spectra on a terminal analogue of the vocal tract. As regards the source spectrum the alto voices show a higher relative amplitude of the fundamental than the tenor voices. As regards the formants, ari apparent differen...