We describe a perceptual space for timbre, define an objective metric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality and measure the quality of timbre interpolation. We discuss two timbre representations and measure perceptual judgments. We determine that a timbre space based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) is a good model for perceptual timbre space.

In this report, we develop a front-end nonlinear auditory model based on recent work of Dau, Puschel, and Kohlrausch (DPK) [Dau, Puschel, and Kohlrausch, 1997]. An important aspect of the model is the robust accentuation of temporal change in a signal at the cochlea level that forms the basis of a feature set for automatic speaker recognition. Preliminary speaker recognition experiments with th...

A new method was developed for the separation of source and transfer function characteristics of speech sounds, with an aim of utilizing it to “flexible” speech synthesis. The method is based on representing source waveform by an HMM, and transfer function by the AR process (AR-HMM model). As compared to methods based on ARX model, where a parametric representation is assumed for source wavefor...

Source wavelet estimation is the key in seismic signal processing for resolving subsurface structural properties. Homomorphic deconvolution using cepstrum analysis has been an effective method for wavelet estimation for decades. In general, the inverse of the Fourier transform of the logarithm of a signal’s Fourier transform is the cepstral domain representation of that signal. The convolution ...

Voice source analysis and modelling has played a key role in important speech applications such as speech recognition, speech synthesis and speaker recognition. This work presents a robust algorithm for glottal closure detection and a novel set of voice source features for speaker recognition. In the rst part of the dissertation the DYPSA algorithm is developed for detecting glottal closure ins...

An ultrasonic backscattered signal from material comprised of quasiperiodic scatterers exhibit redundancy over both its phase and magnitude spectra. This paper addresses the problem of estimating mean-scatterer spacing from the backscattered ultrasound signal using spectral redundancy characterized by the spectral autocorrelation (SAC) function. Mean-scatterer spacing estimates are compared for...

This paper extends the concept of scalar cepstrum coefficients from single-input single-output linear time invariant dynamical systems to multiple-input multiple-output models, making use of the Smith-McMillan form of the transfer function. These coefficients are interpreted in terms of poles and transmission zeros of the underlying dynamical system. We present a method to compute the MIMO ceps...

In speaker recognition systems based on VQ, normally each speaker is assigned a codebook, and the classification is done by means of the a distortion distance of the utterance computed by means of each codebook. In [1] we proposed a system which instead of having a codebook for each speaker, had only one codebook for all the speakers, and for each speaker one histogram. This histogram was the o...