Nowadays tracheoesophageal voice prosthesis after total laryngectomy are widely used. Data on maximum phonation time and spectrum have been studied by different authors and are well known. On the contrary pitch control did not received much attention. Pitch has an important role not only in singing but also in the prosodic characteristics of speech. To our knowledge pitch variations have been s...

The aim of this study was to determine whether musical expertise influences the detection of pitch variations in a foreign language that participants did not understand. To this end, French adults, musicians and nonmusicians, were presented with sentences spoken in Portuguese. The final words of the sentences were prosodically congruous (spoken at normal pitch height) or incongruous (pitch was ...

Linear prediction (LP) coe cients are used to describe the formant structure of a speech waveform. Many factors contribute to the frame-to-frame uctuation of these parameters. These variations adversely a ect the performance of the LP quantizer and the quality of the synthesized speech. For voiced speech, e cient coding of the pitch pulses at the output of the inverse formant lter relies on the...

This paper shows that utterance-medial parentheticals elicited in controlled conditions in French have a typical tonal template, in which pitch is scaled down to some extent in non-intonational phrase-final syllables. Downscaling is implemented primarily as pitch register lowering, while pitch range compression seems speaker-dependent. Results also show remarkable inter-speaker consistency in l...

This research investigates dialectal variations of the pitch accent system in Korean. Specifically, this paper is focused on how speakers of a nonlexical pitch accent dialect are influenced by a lexical pitch accent dialect. Three experiments have participants from two dialectal regions produce pitch accent minimal pairs, and imitate and identify continua spanning pitch accent categories. Resul...

Variations in the spectral shape of harmonic tone complexes are perceived as timbre changes and can lead to poorer fundamental frequency (F0) or pitch discrimination. Less is known about the effects of F0 variations on spectral shape discrimination. The aims of the study were to determine whether the interactions between pitch and timbre are symmetric, and to test whether musical training affec...

In this work, we have studied the effect of pitch variations across the speech signals in context of automatic speech recognition. Our initial study done on vowel data indicates that on account of insufficient smoothing of pitch harmonics by the filterbank, particularly for high pitch signals, the variances of mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature significantly increase with increa...

Music production and perception invoke a complex set of cognitive functions that rely on the integration of sensorimotor, cognitive, and emotional pathways. Pitch is a fundamental perceptual attribute of sound and a building block for both music and speech. Although the cerebral processing of pitch is not completely understood, recent advances in imaging and electrophysiology have provided insi...