Standard cochlea implant (CI) speech coding strategies transmit formant information only via the place of the stimulated electrode. In acoustic hearing, however, formant frequencies are additionally coded via the temporal rate of auditory nerve firing. This study presents a novel CI coding strategy (“Formant Locking (FL)-strategy”) that varies stimulation rates in relation to extracted fundamen...

An experiment has been performed where various two-formant models reported in the literature were assessed as to their ability to predict the formant frequencies obtained in a vowel identification task. An alternative model is proposed in which the auditory processing of vowel sounds is assumed to take place in two stages: a peripheral processing stage and a central processing stage. In the per...

Background Dysarthria refers to a group of disorders resulting from disturbances in muscular control over the speech mechanism due to damage of central or peripheral nervous system. There is wide subjective variability in assessment of dysarthria between different clinicians. In our study, we tried to identify a pattern among types of dysarthria by acoustic analysis and to prevent intersubject ...

The purpose of this study was to assess the preferences of undergraduate college student auditors (N = 139) with respect to a choral sound produced in an anechoic chamber that included a fully resonate singer’s formant and choral sound produced in the same chamber using a weaker singer’s formant resonance. An ensemble comprised of graduate voice students (N = 8) sang four choral music excerpts....

This study examines the acoustic variability in four 4-year-old children: two with cerebral palsy (CP) and two typically developing (TD). One recording from each child, collected from the picture-naming task and spontaneous interaction with adults was analyzed. Acoustic vowel space, pitch and speech rate in their production were investigated. Study findings indicated the following: 1) children ...

In this paper we study changes of the articulatory organs from young adulthood to old age. In particular, we focus on how the larynx and vocal folds age along with the rest of the body. The objective of the paper is to automatically compute the effects of vocal aging on fundamental frequency and the formants. We compare trends of the fundamental, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd formant frequencies as the age...

To date, little research has been done in emotion classification and recognition in speech. Therefore, there is a need to discuss why this topic is interesting and present a system for classifying and recognizing emotions through speech using neural networks through this article. The proposed system will be speaker independent since a database of speech samples will be used. Various classifiers...

The discrete wavelet transform may be used as a signal-processing tool for visualization and analysis of nonstationary, time-sampled waveforms. The highly desirable property of shift invariance can be obtained at the cost of a moderate increase in computational complexity, and accepting a least-squares inverse (pseudoinverse) in place of a true inverse. A new algorithm for the pseudoinverse of ...

Stress plays a crucial role in the understanding of speech by human listeners. However, automatic speech recognition results deteriorate in the presence of stress due to the change it causes in the speech parameters. Meanwhile, due to the vast diversity of the presence of stress in speech, a speech corpus that contains the majority of different stress conditions is difficult to obtain in real w...

The feasibility of using the formant analysis-synthesis approach to replace the voicing sources of esophageal speech was explored. The voicing sources were generated by using inverse-filtered signals extracted from normal speakers. Pitch extraction was tested with various pitch extraction methods, then simple auto-correlation method was chosen. Special hardware unit was designed to perform the ...