The effect of speech melody on voice quality

This paper explores whether a speaker's voice quality, de®ned as the perceived timbre of someone's speech, changes as a function of variation in speech melody. Analyses are based on several productions of the vowel `a', provided with di€erent intonation patterns. It appears that in general fundamental frequency covaries with the `strength relationship' between the ®rst two harmonics (H1±H2). That relationship determines the voice quality to some extent, and is often claimed to re ̄ect open quotient. However, correlating the H1±H2 measure to parameters of the LF-model reveals that both the open quotient and the skewness of the glottal pulse have an impact on the lower part of the harmonic spectrum. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.