Voice activity detection (VAD) is a fundamental task in various speech-related applications, such as speech coding, speaker diarization and speech recognition. It is often defined as the problem of distinguishing speech from silence/noise. A typical VAD system consists of two core parts: a feature extraction and a speech/ non-speech decision mechanism. The first part extracts a set of parameter...

The Czech voiced labiodental continuant has a special position within the system of Czech consonants. Due to its past it sometimes behaves phonologically as a sonorant, while its canonical articulatory qualities place it among obstruents. It is quite difficult to decide how much of its sound is sonorant and how much is obstruent by mere auditory analysis. We investigated whether basic acoustic ...

The problem of determining a continuously distributed neuronal current inside the brain under the assumption of a three-shell model is analysed. It is shown that for an arbitrary geometry, electroencephalography (EEG) provides information about one of the three functions specifying the three components of the current, whereas magnetoencephalography (MEG) provides information about a combination...

A sound classification system for the automatic recognition of the acoustic environment in a hearing aid is discussed. The system distinguishes the four sound classes “clean speech,” “speech in noise,” “noise,” and “music.” A number of features that are inspired by auditory scene analysis are extracted from the sound signal. These features describe amplitude modulations, spectral profile, harmo...

In this paper, we present a fast and efficient technique for multipitch estimation of musical signals. We deal with mixtures where several instruments are present in a monophonic recording. The approach consists in clustering the spectral peaks of the mixture to obtain a spectral representation of each musical note. These spectra are then used to estimate the fundamental frequencies. We compare...

In this paper, a new approach for pitch estimation in polyphonic musical audio is presented. The algorithm is based on the pair-wise analysis of spectral peaks. The idea of the technique lies in the identification of partials with successive (odd) harmonic numbers. Since successive partials of a harmonic sound have well defined frequency ratios, a possible fundamental can be derived from the in...

We are interested in the problem of extracting meaning structures from spoken utterances in human communication. In Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems, parsing of meaning structures is carried over the word hypotheses generated by the Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR). This approach suffers from high word error rates and ad-hoc conceptual representations. In contrast, in this paper we ...

The human auditory system uses a number of well-identified cues to segregate and separate individual sound sources in a complex acoustical environment. For example, researchers in auditory scene analysis have long identified cues such as common onset, correlated fluctuations in instantaneous amplitude and frequency, harmonicity, and common interaural time and amplitude differences as ways of id...

This article is concerned with the estimation of fundamental frequencies in polyphonic signals for the case when the number of sources is known. We propose a new method for joint evaluation of multiple F0 hypotheses based on three physical principles: harmonicity, spectral smoothness and synchronous amplitude evolution within a single source, which are closely related to source segregation in a...