The importance of pitch range variation for intonational meaning and theory is well known; however, whether pitch range is a phonetic dimension which is treated categorically in English remains unclear. To test this possibility, three intonation continua varying in pitch range were constructed which had endpoints with contrastive representations under autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory: H* vs. ...

This study examines the extent to which intonation plays a role in the structuring of information in a Japanese monologue. The role of pitch accent in the intonational system of Japanese is very di erent from that in languages like Dutch or English: in Japanese, pitch accent is a lexical property of words and cannot be used to lend prominence to words at the sentence level. Therefore, we wonder...

A NEW LPC ERROR CRITERION FOR IMPROVED PITCH TRACKING Mohammad R. Zad-Issa and Peter Kabal Electrical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2A7 ABSTRACT In Linear Predictive coders the output of the LP analysis lter is used to represent the glottal excitation signal. For high pitched voices during nasal sounds or nasalized vowels, the speech signal takes on a sinusoidal s...

Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non-native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen-, 17-, and 19-month-olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels contained the same syllable produced with distinct pitch con...

The main aim of the present experiment was to determine whether extensive musical training facilitates pitch contour processing not only in music but also in language. We used a parametric manipulation of final notes' or words' fundamental frequency (F0), and we recorded behavioral and electrophysiological data to examine the precise time course of pitch processing. We compared professional mus...

We present a method for melody detection in polyphonic musical signals based on a model of the human auditory system. First, a set of pitch candidates is obtained for each frame, based on the output of an ear model and periodicity detection using correlograms. Trajectories of the most salient pitches are then constructed. Next, note candidates are obtained by trajectory segmentation (in terms o...

Current time-domain pitch modification techniques have well known limitations for large variations of the original fundamental frequency. This paper proposes a technique for changing the pitch and duration of a speech signal based on time-scaling the linear prediction (LP) residual. The resulting speech signal achieves better quality than the traditional LP-PSOLA method for large fundamental fr...

Up until now, several studies have shown that a speech interface system giving verbal suggestions with beeping sounds that decrease in pitch conveyed a low system confidence level to users intuitively, and these beeping sounds were named “artificial subtle expressions” (ASEs). However, all participants in these studies were only Japanese, so if the participants’ mother tongue has different sens...

[1]Relativistic electron intensities in Earth's outer radiation belt can vary by multiple orders of magnitude on the time scales ranging from minutes to days. One fundamental process contributing to dynamic variability of radiation belt intensities is the radial transport of relativistic electrons across their drift shells. In this paper we analyze the properties of three-dimensional radial tra...

Listeners are able to rate a speaker’s age with reasonable accuracy. Although several speech features are known to be characteristic for specific age groups, there is less knowledge about the perceptual relevance of those parameters. This paper describes the results of a perception study, where single word stimuli were synthesized and rated regarding the perceived age by 20 listeners. All combi...