The paper presents an empirical model of emphatic word detection, as an alternative to conventional machine-learning-based methods. The model is based on the Probabilistic Amplitude Demodulation (PAD) that is iteratively applied for getting syllable and stress modulations, i.e., using the cascaded PAD method. The emphatic words are detected by prominent peaks of the stress modulation and by con...

Auracle is a “group instrument,” controlled by the voice, for real-time, interactive, distributed music making over the Internet. It is implemented in the Javaprogramming language using a combination of publicly available libraries (JSyn and TransJam) and custom-built components. This paper describes how the various pieces — the voice analysis, network communication, and sound synthesis — are i...

The aim of this research is to examine whether French speakers are able to store and retrieve lexical stress information, using a task in which shapes and Spanish pseudowords are matched. The role of the acoustic correlates of lexical stress in the integration of the accentual information was also studied. Results do not seem to support the hypothesis of ‘stress deafness’.

Developmental aspects of emotional expression through vocalizations by infants were investigated using perceptual experiments by normal hearing adults. The voices used were 517 samples recorded from 6 infants at 6, 9,12 and 17 months of age, The results were as follows. 1) Two-way ANOVA with the factors of individuality and age showed significant effects of infant and infantage interaction on t...

In this paper, we investigate the acoustic features that can be modified to control the perceptual age of a singing voice. Singers can sing expressively by controlling prosody and vocal timbre, but the varieties of voices that singers can produce are limited by physical constraints. Previous work has attempted to overcome this limitation through the use of statistical voice conversion. This tec...

‘‘Controllability awareness’’ describes the extent to which an individual’s responses to life situations reflect attention to distinctions between controllable and uncontrollable aspects of potential outcomes. The construct recognizes four aspects of controllability: personal control of outcomes, shared control of outcomes, others in responsibility, and uncontrollable/unpredictable outcomes. La...

Island parsing is a bidirectional parsing strategy mostly used in speech analysis, as well as in applications where robustness is highly relevant and/or processing resources are limited. Although there exists an efficient redundancy-free island parsing algorithm for string input, it has not yet been applied to word graph input, an application which is central for speech analysis systems. This p...

Is multi-band ASR inherently inferior to a full-band approach because phonetic information is lost due to the division of the frequency space into sub-bands? Do the phonetic transitions in sub-bands occur at different times? The first statement is a common objection of the critics of multi-band ASR, and the second, a common assumption by multi-band researchers. This paper is dedicated to findin...