December 13-15, 2007: Firenze, Italy, ed. by C. Manfredi, ISBN 978 88-8453-673-3 (print) ISBN 978-88-8453-674-7 (online) © Firenze university press, 2007. Abstract: Voice is the result of the coordination of the whole pneumophonoarticulatory apparatus. The analysis of the voice allows the identification of the diseases of the vocal apparatus and currently is carried out from an expert doctor th...

Machine-based emotional intelligence is a requirement for more natural interaction between humans and computer interfaces and a basic level of accurate emotion perception is needed for computer systems to respond adequately to human emotion. Humans convey emotional information both intentionally and unintentionally via speech patterns. These vocal patterns are perceived and understood by listen...

It is known that voice quality plays an important role in expressive speech. In this paper, we present a methodology for modifying vocal effort level, which can be applied by text-to-speech (TTS) systems to provide the flexibility needed to improve the naturalness of synthesized speech. This extends previous work using low order Linear Prediction Coefficients (LPC) where the flexibility was con...

This paper describes a speaker identification system that uses complementary acoustic features derived from the vocal source excitation and the vocal tract system. Conventional speaker recognition systems typically adopt the cepstral coefficients, e.g., Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCC), as the representative features. The cepstral fea...

Zebra finch song is represented in the high-level motor control nucleus high vocal center (HVC) (Reiner et al., 2004) as a sparse sequence of spike bursts. In contrast, the vocal organ is driven continuously by smoothly varying muscle control signals. To investigate how the sparse HVC code is transformed into continuous vocal patterns, we recorded in the singing zebra finch from populations of ...

A new lumped-parameter model of human vocal folds with smooth shape derived from measurements on excised human larynges is presented. The mechanical equations of motion are based on previous studies, while the aerodynamic equations are solved by a new finite difference scheme. The model deals with 1-D Navier-Stokes equations, fully coupled with a 2 degrees of freedom rigid body vibrating in the...

Purpose This study examined the relationship between the magnitude of neck-surface vibration (NSVMag; transduced with an accelerometer) and intraoral estimates of subglottal pressure (P'sg) during variations in vocal effort at 3 intensity levels. Method Twelve vocally healthy adults produced strings of /pɑ/ syllables in 3 vocal intensity conditions, while increasing vocal effort during each c...

OBJECTIVES Perform a follow-up study to investigate the histologic impact of high-dose intralaryngeal cidofovir injections in porcine vocal cords, either alone or in combination with bevacizumab, and compared to saline controls. STUDY DESIGN This was an in vivo study involving 24 pigs with blinded pathologist review of specimens. Six groups were created, with four subjects in each group. Each...

The larynx of Xenopus laevis is a sexually differentiated vocal organ in which male muscle is entirely fast twitch and expresses high levels of a fast twitch myosin heavy chain gene, LM. Female muscle, however, is mostly slow twitch and expresses little LM. Androgen is unable to induce expression of LM until after metamorphosis is complete. The expression of LM during metamorphic and early post...

We have compared changes in vocal function produced after insertion of a laryngeal mask airway (LMA) with those produced by tracheal intubation in 20 patients. Using acoustic waveform analysis, we computed amplitude variability (AV), pitch variability (PV), harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) and additive noise level (ANL) before anaesthesia and at 1, 4, and 24 h after tracheal extubation. There wer...