An accurate means for measuring formants
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper describes a new kind of power spectrum which, when properly employed, can provide hitherto unseen accuracy in probing the resonance spectrum of the vocal tract. By drawing on new signal processing techniques developed by Nelson and his collaborators [2, 3], a method for computing a power spectrum has been implemented in Matlab, and applied to the problem of the accurate measurement of formant frequencies and other resonances. Some direct information about formant bandwidths is also available in the spectrum, though this may or may not be sufficiently readable to provide accurate measurements. The resulting computed spectrum, which we call the “Nelson power spectrum” in honor of the person principally responsible for the theory behind it, has been proven by Nelson to be a good estimate of a theoretical spectrum which has frequency resolution far beyond that of the familiar Fourier transform power spectrum, and far fewer errors and artifacts as well. While Nelson’s papers present the mathematical theory behind this new technique, there are only loose guidelines as to specific digital-domain methods and algorithms. The principal contributions of this paper are the development of a method using the Nelson spectrum for the measurement of formants and other vocal tract resonances with examples generated by a Matlab implementation, and the presentation and discussion of a complete pseudocode algorithm for computing the Nelson spectrum. Since a picture is worth a thousand words in this case, we will leave it to the example images to convince the reader that there is simply no other way of measuring formant frequencies that can even come close to the accuracy and confidence that are provided by the Nelson power spectrum, and we consequently advocate this technique as a new benchmark for the accurate measurement of vocal tract resonances.
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