Same same but different - an acoustical comparison of the automatic segmentation of high quality and mobile telephone speech

In this paper we present a comparison of the performance of the automatic phonetic segmentation and labeling system MAUS [1] for two different signal qualities. For a forensic study on the similarity of voices within a family [2], eight speakers from four families were recorded simultaneously in both high bandwidth and mobile phone quality. The recordings were then automatically segmented and labeled using MAUS. The results show marked effects on the segment counts and durations between the two signal qualities: for the mobile phone quality, the segment counts for fricatives were much lower than for high quality recordings, whereas the segment counts for plosives and vowels increased. The segment duration of fricatives was much lower for mobile phone recordings, slightly lower for the front vowels, but quite much longer for the back and low vowels.