In a recent paper Paczuski, Maslov and Bak present a comprehensive theory of avalanche dynamics in models of growth, interface depinning and evolution. One of their main results is the so-called gamma equation, which is claimed to be exact. In this note it is shown that this equation requires a numerical correction factor in order to become exact. The exactness is needed when using the equation...

Fundamental frequency (F0) extraction is often used in voice quality analysis. In pathological voices with a high degree of instability in F0, it is common for F0 extraction algorithms to fail. In such cases, the faulty F0 values might spoil the possibilities for further data analysis. This paper presents the correlogram, a new method of displaying periodicity. The correlogram is based on the w...

When two people speak at the same time, it is easier to understand what either of them is saying if the voices differ in fundamental frequency (F0). The contribution of F0 to the intelligibility of pairs of simultaneous sentences was investigated using a high-quality speech vocoder. Word identification accuracy improved by 23% as the F0 difference between the voices increased from 0 to 8 semito...

This paper describes a stochastic modeling between an F0 contour and linguistic features of a sentence for speech synthesis. The F0 contour of a sentence is represented by concatenation of the F0 patterns of a Japanese syntactic unit, bunsetsu. A bunsetsu F0 pattern is composed of the F0 average and the F0 shape. The F0 average is independently predicted for each bunsetsu by a quantification th...