Recent studies have shown that time-varying changes in formant pattern contribute to the phonetic specification of vowels. This variation could be especially important in children's vowels, because children have higher fundamental frequencies (f0's) than adults, and formant-frequency estimation is generally less reliable when f0 is high. To investigate the contribution of time-varying changes i...

This article presents a new algorithm used in order to convert the speech of one speaker so that it sounds like that of another speaker. This algorithm flexibly converts voice quality using two major technical developments. Firstly, the modification of formant frequencies and spectral intensity using piecewise linear voice conversion rules. This enables the control of spectrum parameters in det...

Aim: To investigate the characteristics of vocal tract resonance in Hindi Esophageal Speakers. Methodology: Five normal Hindi speakers and five Hindi esophageal speakers participated in this study. They were asked to produce the three corner vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ in the three different conditions like nonsustained, sustained and word level. The average first three formant frequencies F1, F2,...

Formant frequencies have rarely been used as acoustic features for speech recognition, in spite of their phonetic significance. For some speech sounds one or more of the formants may be so badly defined that it is not useful to attempt a frequency measurement. Also, it is often difficult to decide which formant labels to attach to particular spectral peaks. This paper describes a new method of ...

This paper presents a new method for estimating formant frequencies. The formant model is based on a digital resonator. Each resonator represents a segment of the short-time power spectrum. The complete spectrum is modeled by a set of digital resonators connected in parallel. An algorithm based on dynamic programming produces both the model parameters and the segment boundaries that optimally m...

A psycho-acoustical experiment was conducted using synthetic vowel-like stimuli to examine effect of formant amplitude in vowel perception. Nine combinations of formant frequencies were examined. For each combination, relative amplitude of the third to the second formants was modified in seven degrees. In eight of the nine combinations, perceived vowels were changed according to the formant amp...

Examining how increasing distance affects the information content of vocal signals is fundamental for determining the active space of a given species' vocal communication system. In the current study we played back male koala bellows in a Eucalyptus forest to determine the extent that individual classification of male koala bellows becomes less accurate over distance, and also to quantify how i...