The four experiments reported here measure listeners' accuracy and consistency in adjusting a formant frequency of one- or two-formant complex sounds to match the timbre of a target sound. By presenting the target and the adjustable sound on different fundamental frequencies, listeners are prevented from performing the task by comparing the absolute or relative levels of resolved spectral compo...

The goal of this study was to analyse perceptually and acoustically the voices of patients with Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis (UVFP) and compare them to the voices of normal subjects. These voices were analysed perceptually with the GRBAS scale and acoustically using the following parameters: mean fundamental frequency (F0), standard-deviation of F0, jitter (ppq5), shimmer (apq11), mean harmo...

The relationship between fundamental frequency of phonation (F0) and the change in F0 per unit change of transglottal pressure (dF/dP) was investigated in 3 excised canine larynges. The effects of the length and depth of vocal fold vibration on the relationship between dF/dP and F0 were evaluated. A positive correlation between dF/dP and F0 was observed when an increase in F0 was accompanied by...

This paper presents a preliminary study on acoustical analysis of fundamental frequency (F0) in continuous Cantonese speech. By understanding how the surface F0 contour is determined by many co-functioning and inter-playing linguistic or non-linguistic factors, our ultimate goal is to facilitate automatic F0 prediction for highly natural text-to-speech synthesis. A novel method of F0 normalizat...

A significant fact about speech perception is that intelligibility is preserved when the spectrum is shifted up or down along the frequency scale, across a fairly wide range. To study the relationship between fundamental frequency (F0) and spectrum envelope shifts in vowel perception, we used a high-quality vocoder (STRAIGHT) to process a set of vowels spoken by 3 adult males in /hVd/ context. ...

This study compared the prosody of sarcastic and sincere attitudes in Mexican Spanish in terms of three sentence-level factors (i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) mean, F0 range, and speed of speech) and three word-level factors (i.e. stressed syllable duration, F0 movement, and stressed vowel intensity). For F0, the connection between utterance-final activity and attitude was also examined. Acous...

This paper addresses the problem of the fundamental frequency (F0) determination of a speech signal, and proposes four improvements to conventional frequency-domain methods. The major improvement is a multi-scale analysis which extends the range of F0 that can be correctly processed. It builds on the lag-window method proposed by Sagayama (1978), hence the name “multi-lagwindow”. Secondly, a mo...

In many primates, including humans, the vocalizations of males and females differ dramatically, with male vocalizations and vocal anatomy often seeming to exaggerate apparent body size. These traits may be favoured by sexual selection because low-frequency male vocalizations intimidate rivals and/or attract females, but this hypothesis has not been systematically tested across primates, nor is ...

A significant fact about speech perception is that intelligibility is preserved when the spectrum is shifted up or down along the frequency scale, across a fairly wide range. To study the relationship between fundamental frequency (F0) and spectrum envelope shifts in vowel perception, we used a high-quality vocoder (STRAIGHT) to process a set of vowels spoken by 3 adult males in /hVd/ context. ...

Identification of simultaneous speech sounds, such as pairs of steady-state vowels (double vowels), is more accurate when there is a difference in fundamental frequency (F0). Accuracy of identification for double vowels increases with increasing F0 difference (delta F0) asymptoting above 1 semitone. The experiment described here attempts to distinguish two mechanisms underlying this effect: fir...