A series of experiments examined auditory contour formation, investigating listeners' sensitivities to a family of random fractals known as fractional Brownian noises. Experiments 1A and 1B looked at identification of contours when 3 different noises were portrayed using variations in the pitch, duration, or loudness of successive notes of a sequence. Listeners could categorize pitch and loudne...

Neural representation of pitch is influenced by lifelong experiences with music and language at both cortical and subcortical levels of processing. The aim of this article is to determine whether neural plasticity for pitch representation at the level of the brainstem is dependent upon specific dimensions of pitch contours that commonly occur as part of a native listener's language experience. ...

This acoustic study explored dialect effects on realization of nuclear pitch accents in three regional varieties of American English spoken in central Ohio, southeastern Wisconsin and western North Carolina. Fundamental frequency (f0) change from vowel onset to offset in the most prominent syllable in a sentence was examined along four parameters: maximum f0 change, relative location of f0 maxi...

With Cantonese as the target language, this study investigates the phonetic details of contextual tonal variations in disyllabic tonal sequences. It is found that the main source of F0 (fundamental frequency) contour deviation from the canonical form comes from carryover effect, which is assimilatory in nature. Furthermore, based on the Target Approximation (TA) model, an optimization problem i...

Emotional state recognition through speech is being a very interesting research topic nowadays. Using subliminal information of speech, it is possible to recognize the emotional state of the person. One of the main problems in the design of automatic emotion recognition systems is the small number of available patterns. This fact makes the learning process more difficult, due to the generalizat...

Consonants, unlike vowels, are thought to be speech specific and therefore no interactions would be expected between consonants and pitch, a basic element for musical tones. The present study used an electrophysiological approach to investigate whether, contrary to this view, there is integrative processing of consonants and pitch by measuring additivity of changes in the mismatch negativity (M...

Pitch modelling is considered to be an important factor in speech synthesis where the pitch contour plays a demonstrable role in the intelligibility and naturalness of synthesised speech. While quantitative models for pitch contours have been proposed previously, each of these have a fixed level of details and as such not all of them provide the basis either for automatic extraction of pitch mo...

The pitch contour contains information that characterises the emotion being expressed by speech, and consequently features extracted from pitch form an integral part of many automatic emotion recognition systems. While pitch contours may have many small variations and hence are difficult to represent compactly, it may be possible to parameterise them by approximating the contour for each voiced...

This paper describes the modeling of the various components in a pitch controlled wind energy system and the design of the pitch controller, and discusses the response of the pitch-controlled system to wind velocity variations. The investigated pitch control system was observed to have a large output power variation and settling time. The pitch function provides full control over the mechanical...