Using a known speaker-intrinsic normalization procedure, formant data are scaled by the reciprocal of the geometric mean of the first three formant frequencies. This reduces the influence of the talker but results in a distorted vowel space. The proposed speaker-extrinsic procedure re-scales the normalized values by the mean formant values of vowels. When tested on the formant data of vowels pu...

The topic of this paper is formant frequency prediction using multiple linear regression. This technique provides robust formant frequency estimates but with limited precision. We apply this approach to predict formant frequencies of one male speaker comparing three different spectral representations. Mel scaled filterbanks are shown to perform slightly better than linear prediction based cepst...

This paper presents a novel method of formant tracking. It shows that formant information can be extracted from the cepstrum coefficients . Explicit nonlinear formulas has been developed to map psd (power spectral density) of speech signal to formant frequencies. Formants can be tracked by ESPRIT (Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques). An ”‘constrained”’ ESPRIT s...

The main cue to interrogativity in Dutch declarative questions is found in the final boundary tone. When whispering, a speaker does not produce the most important acoustic information conveying this: the fundamental frequency. In this paper listeners are shown to perceive the difference between whispered declarative questions and statements, though less clearly than in phonated speech. Moreover...

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of four different emotions expressed in speech. The aim is to obtain detailed acoustic knowledge on how a speech signal is modulated by changes from neutral to a certain emotional state. Such knowledge is necessary for automatic emotion recognition and classification and emotional speech synthesis. Speech data obtained from two semi-professio...

This paper presents a novel approach to integration of formant frequency and conventional MFCC data in phone recognition experiments on TIMIT. Naive use of format data introduces classification errors if formant frequency estimates are poor, resulting in a net drop in performance. However, by exploiting a measure of confidence in the formant frequency estimates, formant data can contribute to c...