Constructing a speech banana for Thai consonants: Some considerations for male and female voices

“Speech banana” is a banana-shaped plot of speech power distribution. It shows speech sounds spoken with normal loudness in terms of frequency and intensity level. Speech bananas have been mainly proposed for Indo-European languages. This work describes an ongoing work of constructing a speech banana for Thai, a Non-Indo-European language. Speech materials are taken from 11 Thais (males and females). Comparisons are carried out to examine if there is any difference in speech power distribution of 21 consonants from male and female voices. The findings show statistically significant differences in terms of level of intensity for 13 phonemes (//, //, //, //, //, //, //, //, //, //, /, /, /) and in terms of frequency for // only. It is suggested that significant acoustic differences associated with male and female voices should be incorporated in representation of speech banana.