• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.557-565
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• 2009

To perceive the direction and the distance of a sound, we always use a couple of information. Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) contains the information that sound arrives from a sound source to the ears of the listener, like differences of level, phase and frequency spectrum. For a reproduction system using 2 channels, we apply HRTF to many algorithms which make 3d sound. But it causes a problem to localize a sound source around a certain places which is called the cone-of-confusion. In this paper, we proposed the new algorithm to reduce the confusion of sound image localization. The difference of frequency spectrum and psychoacoustics theory are used to boost the spectral cue among each directions. To confirm the performance of the algorithm, informal listening tests are carried out. As a result, we can make the improved 3d sound in 2 channel system based on a headphone. Also sound quality of improved 3d sound is much better than conventional methods.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.379-385
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose an effective speech reinforcement technique under the near-end and the far-end noise environments. In general, since the intelligibility of the far-end speech for the near-end listener is significantly reduced under near-end noise environments, we require a far-end speech reinforcement approach to avoid this phenomena. Specifically, based on the estimated background noise spectrum of the near-end, we reinforce the far-end speech spectrum by incorporating the more general cases under the near-end with background noise. Also, we propose the novel approach to reinforce the actual speech signal except for the noise signal in the far-end noisy speech signal. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by the CCR (Comparison Category Rating) test of the method for subjective determination of transmission quality in ITU-T P.800 under various noise environments and shows better performances compared with the conventional method.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.81-90
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• 2023

Auditory perceptual assessment and acoustic analysis are commonly used in clinical practice for voice evaluation. This study aims to explore the effects of speech task context on auditory perceptual assessment and acoustic measures in patients with voice disorders. Sustained vowel phonations (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /ɯ/, /ʌ/) and connected speech (a standardized paragraph 'kaeul' and nine sub-sentences) were obtained from a total of 22 patients with voice disorders. GRBAS ('G', 'R', 'B', 'A', 'S') and CAPE-V ('OS', 'R', 'B', 'S', 'P', 'L') auditory-perceptual assessment were evaluated by two certified speech language pathologists specializing in voice disorders using blind and random voice samples. Additionally, spectral and cepstral measures were analyzed using the analysis of dysphonia in speech and voice model (ADSV).When assessing voice quality with the GRBAS scale, it was not significantly affected by the vowel type except for 'B', while the 'OS', 'R' and 'B' in CAPE-V were affected by the vowel type (p<.05). In addition, measurements of CPP and L/H ratio were influenced by vowel types and sentence positions. CPP values in the standard paragraph showed significant negative correlations with all vowels, with the highest correlation observed for /e/ vowel (r=-.739). The CPP of the second sentence had the strongest correlation with all vowels. Depending on the speech stimulus, CAPE-V may have a greater impact on auditory-perceptual assessment than GRBAS, vowel types and sentence position with consonants influenced the 'B' scale, CPP, and L/H ratio. When using vowels in the voice assessment of patients with voice disorders, it would be beneficial to use not only /a/, but also the vowel /i/, which is acoustically highly correlated with 'breathy'. In addition, the /e/ vowel was highly correlated acoustically with the standardized passage and sub-sentences. Furthermore, given that most dysphonic signals are aperiodic, 2nd sentence of the 'kaeul' passage, which is the most acoustically correlated with all vowels, can be used with CPP. These results provide clinical evidence of the impact of speech tasks on auditory perceptual and acoustic measures, which may help to provide guidelines for voice evaluation in patients with voice disorders.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.24-33
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• 2001

this paper describes a baseline for an implementation of a corpus-based Korean TTS system. The conventional TTS systems using small-sized speech still generate machine-like synthetic speech. To overcome this problem we introduce the corpus-based TTS system which enables to generate natural synthetic speech without prosodic modifications. The corpus should be composed of a natural prosody of source speech and multiple instances of synthesis units. To make a phone level synthesis unit, we train a speech recognizer with the target speech, and then perform an automatic phoneme segmentation. We also detect the fine pitch period using Laryngo graph signals, which is used for prosodic feature extraction. For break strength allocation, 4 levels of break indices are decided as pause length and also attached to phones to reflect prosodic variations in phrase boundaries. To predict the break strength on texts, we utilize the statistical information of POS (Part-of-Speech) sequences. The best triphone sequences are selected by Viterbi search considering the minimization of accumulative Euclidean distance of concatenating distortion. To get high quality synthesis speech applicable to commercial purpose, we introduce a domain specific database. By adding domain specific database to general domain database, we can greatly improve the quality of synthetic speech on specific domain. From the subjective evaluation, the new Korean corpus-based TTS system shows better naturalness than the conventional demisyllable-based one.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.6
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• pp.180-187
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a LED communication based multi-hop audio data transmission network system. The main contribution and features of the proposed system are as follows. First, the contribution of this research is to develope the LED communication based multi-hop transmission network system which can transmit audio data signal with long distance via multi-hops. Second, the developed system has the following features: In transmitter, audio data is transmitted after encoding with S/PDIF format via a general LED. The relay receives digital audio signal by using photo diode and then transmits the signal to receiver after error checking and amplifying. The receiver receives the encoded audio data via photo diode and then converts to analog audio signal by using decoding and amplifying. The performance evaluation of the proposed system is conducted in the laboratory with fluorescent light source. The results of the performance evaluation confirm that the system can provide high quality audio transmission from transmiter to receiver via multi-hop relays in a long distance while we can see there are differences in the transmitted audio quality according to the used LED colors.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.180-186
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• 2004

The presence of noise in speech signals degrades the performance of recognition systems in which there are mismatches between the training and test environments. To make a speech recognizer robust, it is necessary to compensate these mismatches. In this paper, we studied about an improvement of stochastic feature extraction based on band-SNR for robust speech recognition. At first, we proposed a modified version of the multi-band spectral subtraction (MSS) method which adjusts the subtraction level of noise spectrum according to band-SNR. In the proposed method referred as M-MSS, a noise normalization factor was newly introduced to finely control the over-estimation factor depending on the band-SNR. Also, we modified the architecture of the stochastic feature extraction (SFE) method. We could get a better performance when the spectral subtraction was applied in the power spectrum domain than in the mel-scale domain. This method is denoted as M-SFE. Last, we applied the M-MSS method to the modified stochastic feature extraction structure, which is denoted as the MMSS-MSFE method. The proposed methods were evaluated on isolated word recognition under various noise environments. The average error rates of the M-MSS, M-SFE, and MMSS-MSFE methods over the ordinary spectral subtraction (SS) method were reduced by 18.6%, 15.1%, and 33.9%, respectively. From these results, we can conclude that the proposed methods provide good candidates for robust feature extraction in the noisy speech recognition.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.7C
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• pp.691-699
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• 2006

Despite of the in-depth effort to cantrol the variability in IP networks, quality of service (QoS) is still not guaranteed in the IP networks. Thus, it is necessary to deal with the audible artifacts caused by packet lasses. To overcame the packet loss problem, most speech coding standard have their own embedded packet loss concealment (PLC) algorithms which adapt extrapolation methods utilizing the dependency on adjacent frames. Since many low bit rate CELP coders use predictive schemes for increasing coding efficiency, however, error propagation occurs even if single packet is lost. In this paper, we propose an efficient PLC algorithm with consideration about the speech characteristics of lost frames. To design an efficient PLC algorithm, we perform several experiments on investigating the error propagation effect of lost frames of a predictive coder. And then, we summarize the impact of packet loss to the speech characteristics and analyze the importance of the encoded parameters depending on each speech classes. From the result of the experiments, we propose a new PLC algorithm that mainly focuses on reducing the error propagation time. Experimental results show that the performance is much higher than conventional extrapolation methods over various frame erasure rate (FER) conditions. Especially the difference is remarkable in high FER condition.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.84-89
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• 2003

In this paper, we real-time implemented to the TMS320C5416 the vocoder of variable bit rate applied the SOLA-B algorithm by Henja to the ITU-T G.729A vocoder of 8kbps transmission rate. This proposed method using the SOLA-B algorithm is that it is reduced the duration of the speech in encoding and is played at the speed of normal by extending the duration of the speech in decoding. At this time, we bandied that the interval of cross correlation function if skipped every 3 sample for decreasing the computational amount of SOLA-B algorithm. The real-time implemented vocoder of C.729A and SOLA-B algorithm is represented the complexity of maximum that is 10.2MIPS in encoder and 2.8MIPS in decoder of 8kbps transmission rate. Also, it is represented the complexity of maximum that is 18.5MIPS in encoder and 13.1MIPS in decoder of 6kbps, it is 18.5MIPS in encoder and 13.1MIPS in decoder of 4kbps. The used memory is about program ROM 9.7kwords, table ROM 4.5kwords, RAM 5.1 kwords. The waveform of output is showed by the result of C simulator and Bit Exact. Also, for evaluation of speech quality of the vocoder of real-time implemented variable bit rate, it is estimated the MOS score of 3.69 in 4kbps.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.81-89
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• 2008

Wideband speech, characterized by a bandwidth of about 7 kHz (50-7000 Hz), provides a substantial quality improvement in terms of naturalness and intelligibility. Although higher data rates are required, it has extended its application to audio and video conferencing, high-quality multimedia communications in mobile links or packet-switched transmissions, and digital AM broadcasting. In this paper, we present a new bandwidth-scalable coder for wideband speech and audio signals. The proposed coder spits 8kHz signal bandwidth into two narrow bands, and different coding schemes are applied to each band. The lower-band signal is coded using the ITU-T G.729/G.729E coder, and the higher-band signal is compressed using a new algorithm based on the gammatone filter bank with an invertible auditory model. Due to the split-band architecture and completely independent coding schemes for each band, the output speech of the decoder can be selected to be a narrowband or wideband according to the channel condition. Subjective tests showed that, for wideband speech and audio signals, the proposed coder at 14.2/18 kbit/s produces superior quality to ITU-T 24 kbit/s G.722.1 with the shorter algorithmic delay.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.71-77
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• 2020

Background and Objectives OperaVOXTM (Oxford Wave Research Ltd.) is a portable voice analysis software package designed for use with iOS devices. As a relatively cheap, portable and easily accessible form of acoustic analysis, OperaVOXTM may be more clinically useful than laboratory-based software in many situations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the agreement between OperaVOXTM and Multi-Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP; Computerized Speech Lab) to assess voice quality before and after laryngeal microsurgery in patient with vocal polyp. Materials and Method Twenty patients who had undergone laryngeal microsurgery for vocal polyp were enrolled in this study. Preoperative and postoperative voices were assessed by acoustic analysis using MDVP and OperaVOXTM. A five-seconds recording of vowel /a/ was used to measure fundamental frequency (F0), jitter, shimmer and noise-to-harmonic ratio (NHR). Results Several acoustic parameters of MDVP and OperaVOXTM related to short-term variability showed significant improvement. While pre-operative value of F0, jitter, shimmer, NHR was 155.75 Hz (male: 125.37 Hz, female: 183.37 Hz), 2.20%, 6.28%, 0.16, post-operative values of these parameter was 164.34 Hz (male: 129.42 Hz, female: 199.26 Hz), 2.15%, 5.18%, 0.14 Hz in MDVP. While pre-operative value of F0, jitter, shimmer, NHR was 168.26 Hz (male: 135.16 Hz, female: 201.37 Hz), 2.27%, 6.95%, 0.26, post-operative values of these parameters was 162.72 Hz (male: 128.267 Hz, female: 197.18 Hz), 1.71%, 5.36%, 0.20 in OperaVOXTM. There was high intersoftware agreement for F0, jitter, shimmer with intraclass correlation coefficient. Conclusion Our results showed that the short-term variability of acoustic parameters in both MDVP and OperaVOXTM were useful for the objective assessment of voice quality in patients who received laryngeal microsurgery. OperaVOXTM is comparable to MDVP and has high intersoftware reliability with MDVP in measuring the F0, jitter, and shimmer