The "singer's formant" is a prominent spectrum envelope peak near 3 kHz, typically found in voiced sounds produced by classical operatic singers. According to previous research, it is mainly a resonatory phenomenon produced by a clustering of formants 3, 4, and 5. Its level relative to the first formant peak varies depending on vowel, vocal loudness, and other factors. Its dependence on vowel f...

Low bit rate speech coders often employ both formant and pitch predictors to remove near-sample and distant-sample redundancies in the speech signal. The coefficients of these predictors are usually determined for one prediction filter and then for the other (a sequential solution). This paper deals with formant and pitch predictors which are jointly optimized. The first configuration considere...

The personal quality of sustained vowels uttered by eight male talkers was represented multidimensionally in a psychological auditory space (PAS) by means of Kruskal’s multidimensional scaling procedure based on the perceptual confusion in talker discrimination tests. Physical properties of the vowels were analyzed in terms of elementary acoustical parameters, such as formant frequencies, slope...

Recemly three different modifications over the Burg method of autoregressive (AR) spectral estimation are proposed by Swingler [5], Kaveh and Lippert [6], and Scott and Nikias [7], where the linear prediction error is weighted prior to its minimization. In the present paper, we study these weighted Burg methods for pitch-synchronous analysis of short segments (duration less than one pitch perio...

We develop an acoustic feature set for the estimation of a person’s age from a recorded speech signal. The baseline features are Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) which are extended by various prosodic features, pitch and formant frequencies. From experiments on the University of Florida Vocal Aging Database we can draw different conclusions. On the one hand, adding prosodic, pitch an...

Realistic Voice Gender Conversion (VGC) requires independent scaling of the glottal (pitch) and vocal tract (formant) related features of the input speech signal. We present a VGC algorithm which has two novel features. Firstly, an efficient frequency scaling algorithm is presented. Secondly, we use this to scale all frequencies in the input signal by the desired formant scaling factor. We then...

The objective of this paper is to critically evaluate the performance of a nonstationary analysis method in tracking speech formant frequencies as they change with time due to the natural variations in the vocal-tract system during speech production. The method of instantaneous frequency estimation is applied to the tracking of speech formant frequencies to observe the time variations in the vo...

We conducted a comparative study of a voice produced by a professional impersonator imitating a target speaker to explore the acoustical characteristics that the impersonator changes from his natural voice to imitate a target voice. Comparison of the pitch frequency of the target and imitated voices showed that the mean and dynamics of the pitch frequency of the imitated voice are changed so th...

Fundamental and formant frequencies influence perceived pitch and are sexually dimorphic in humans. The information content of these acoustic parameters can illuminate the forces of sexual selection shaping vocal sex differences as well as the mechanisms that ensure signal reliability. We use multiple regression to examine the relationships between somatic (height, adiposity, and strength) and ...