An optimized fundamental frequency (F0) trajectory extraction method, which alleviates systematic F0 glitches at vowelnasal boundaries and in the vicinity of consonants, is introduced. The proposed method employes minimum phase group delay compensation for apparent F0 modulations due to variations in their corresponding vocal tract transfer functions. This method can also be considered as an im...

Three experiments investigated the relationship between harmonic number, harmonic resolvability, and the perception of harmonic complexes. Complexes with successive equal-amplitude sine- or random-phase harmonic components of a 100- or 200-Hz fundamental frequency (f0) were presented dichotically, with even and odd components to opposite ears, or diotically, with all harmonics presented to both...

When two people speak at the same time, it is easier to understand what either of them is saying if the voices differ in fundamental frequency (F0). The contribution of F0 to the intelligibility of pairs of simultaneous sentences was investigated using a high-quality speech vocoder. Word identification accuracy improved by 23% as the F0 difference between the voices increased from 0 to 8 semito...

This paper proposes an asynchronous model structure for fundamental frequency(F0) and spectrum modeling in HMMbased parametric speech synthesis to improve the performance of F0 prediction. F0 and spectrum features are considered to be synchronous in the conventional system. Considering that the production of these two features is decided by the movement of different speech organs, an explicitly...

We investigated the effect on objective speech intelligibility of scaling the fundamental frequency (f0) of voiced regions in a set of utterances. The frequency scaling was driven by maximising the glimpse proportion in voiced epochs, inspired by musical consonance maximisation techniques. Results show that depending on the energetic masker and the signal to noise ratio, f0 modifications increa...

In this paper, we describe a speech re-synthesis tool using the fundamental frequency (F0) generation model proposed by Fujisaki et al. and STRAIGHT, designed by Kawahara, which can be used for listening experiments by modifying F0 model parameters. To create the tool, we first established a method for automatically estimating F0 model parameters by using genetic algorithms. Next, we combined t...

An experiment investigated the effects of amplitude ratio (-35 to 35 dB in 10-dB steps) and fundamental frequency difference (0%, 3%, 6%, and 12%) on the identification of pairs of concurrent synthetic vowels. Vowels as weak as -25 dB relative to their competitor were easier to identify in the presence of a fundamental frequency difference (delta F0). Vowels as weak as -35 dB were not. Identifi...

A system for user-guided audio source separation is presented in this article. Following previous works on time-frequency music representations, the proposed User Interface allows the user to select the desired audio source, by means of the assumed fundamental frequency (F0) track of that source. The system then automatically refines the selected F0 tracks, estimates and separates the correspon...

Fundamental frequency (f0) difference limens (DLs) were measured as a function of f0 for sine- and random-phase harmonic complexes, bandpass filtered with 3-dB cutoff frequencies of 2.5 and 3.5 kHz (low region) or 5 and 7 kHz (high region), and presented at an average 15 dB sensation level (approximately 48 dB SPL) per component in a wideband background noise. Fundamental frequencies ranged fro...

Introduction: Men who experience an increase in testosterone following competition tend to behave more aggressively in future competitions. Fundamental frequency (F0), the characteristic closely associated with vocal pitch, is negatively related to men's testosterone levels. Men who perceived themselves as dominant lower their voice pitch during competitive interactions. To date, no research ha...