Automated Measurement of Vowel Formants in the Buckeye Corpus

In recent years, corpus phonetics has become a rapidly expanding field. However, the lack of appropriate tools for automatic acoustic analysis hinders further development of the field. In this paper, we present a methodological study on the automatic extraction of vowel formants using both robust linear predictive coding (RLPC; Lee, 1988) and dynamic formant tracking (Talkin, 1987). Acoustic data were taken from the Buckeye corpus of English conversations. We varied two aspects of the analysis preemphasis and LPC order to optimize formant tracking results by speaker and vowel. We also show, based on the optimal results, the distribution of ten English vowels in the F1/F2 space in conversational speech.