• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.10-14
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• 2005

Background and Objectives : Vowels are characterized on the basis of formant patterns. The first formant(F1) is determined by high-low placement of the tongue, and the second formant (F2) by front-back placement of the tongue. The fundamental frequency(F0) of a soprano often exceed the normal frequency of the first formant. And the vocal intensity is boosted when F0 is high and a harmonic coincides with a formant. This is called a formant tuning. Experienced singers thus learned how to tune their formants over a resonable range by lowering the tongue to maximize their vocal intensity. So, the current study aimed to identify the formant tuning in one experienced soprano by comparing the first formants of vowel [i] in three different voice production : speech, ascending scale, and vocalize. Materials and Method : All voices recordings of vowel [i] in speech, ascending scale (from F4 note to A4 note), and vocalize(:Ridente la calam") were made with digital audio tape-corder in a sound treated room. And the captured data were analyzed by the long term average(LTA) power spectrum using the FFT algorithm of the Computerized Speech Lab(CSL, Kay elementrics, Model, 4300B). Results : Although the first formant of vowel [i] in speech was 238Hz, those of ascending scale [i] were 377Hz, 405Hz, 453Hz respectively in F4(349z), G4(392Hz), A4(440Hz) note, and 722Hz, 820Hz, 918Hz respectively in F5 (698Hz), G5(784Hz), A5(880Hz) note. In vocalize, first formants of [i] were 380Hz, 398Hz, 453Hz respectively in F4, G4, A4 note, and 720Hz, 821Hz, 890Hz respectively in F5, G5, A5 note. Conclusion : These results showed that the first formant of ascending scale and vocalize sustained higher frequency than fundamental frequency in high pitch. This finding implicates that the formant tuning of vowel [i] in ascending scale was also noted in vocalize.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.133-139
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• 2014

This paper describes several approaches to transform a speaker's individuality to another's individuality using frequency warping between bilingual formant frequencies on different language environments. The proposed methods are simple and intuitive voice conversion algorithms that do not use training data between different languages. The approaches find the warping function from source speaker's frequency to target speaker's frequency on formant space. The formant space comprises four representative monophthongs for each language. The warping functions can be represented by piecewise linear equations, inverse matrix. The used features are pure frequency components including magnitudes, phases, and line spectral frequencies (LSF). The experiments show that the LSF-based voice conversion methods give better performance than other methods.

• MALSORI
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• no.60
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• pp.67-84
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to find some acoustic parameters on frequency domain to distinguish the Korean nasals, $/m,\;n,\;{\eta}/$ from each other. The new parameters are devised on the basis of LTAS (Long Term Average Spectrum). The maximum peak amplitude and the relevant formant frequency are measured in low and high frequency range, respectively. The frequency of spectral valley and its energy level are also obtained in the specific frequency range of the spectrum. Spectral slope, total energy value in specific frequency range, statistical distribution of spectral energy like centroid, skewness, and kurtosis are suggested as new parameters as well. The parameters that show statistically significant differences across nasals are summerized as follows. 1) in syllable initial positions: the total energy value from 1,500 to 2,200 Hz(zeroENG); 2) in syllable final positions: the peak amplitude of the first formant(peak1_a), the formant frequency with maximum peak amplitude from 4,000 to 8,000 Hz(peak2_f), the maximum peak amplitude of the formant frequency from 4,000 to 8,000 Hz(peak2_a), and the total energy value from 1,500 to 2,200 Hz(zeroENG).

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.98-111
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• 2004

Background and Objectives : The purpose of this study is to analyze the difference of Fundamental Frequency(Hz), Closed Quotient(Qx ; %), Intensity(dB), Vocal tract length and width(cm), formant frequency(Hz), level of formant frequency(dB) depending on the larynx position. Materials and Methods : One professional male singer(career : 28 years) produced sustained vowel /a/,/e/,/i/,/o/,/u/ in two larynx position (higher, lower) with Dr. Speech and video fluoroscopy was used to quantify the vocal tract morphology. Results : In lower larynx position, CQ is increased 9.8% and Intensity is increased about 10% and level of Formant Frequency is increased. And also Vocal tract length is longer 2.4cm, Vocal tract width(Anterior width : 0.4cm, lateral width : 0.2cm) is wider than in higher larynx position. Conclusions : Singer's formant has a prominent spectrum envelope peak near 2400-2600Hz by clustering of F3, F4 and F5 near 3400Hz in lower larynx position.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.49-53
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• 2017

Formant frequencies depend on the position of tongue, the shape of lips, and larynx. In the auditory system, the external ear canal is an open-end resonator, which can modify the voice characteristics. This study investigates the effect of the real ear on formant frequencies. Fifteen subjects ranging from 22 to 30 years of age participated in the study. This study employed three corner vowels: the low central vowel /a/, the high front vowel /i/, and the high back vowel /u/. For this study, the voice of a well-educated undergraduate who majored in speech-language pathology, was recorded with a high performance condenser microphone placed in the upper pinna and in the ear canal. Paired t-test showed that there were significant difference in the formant frequencies of F1, F2, F3, and F4 between the free field and the real ear. For /a/, all formant frequencies decreased significantly in the real ear. For /i/, F2 increased and F3 and F4 decreased. For /u/, F1 and F2 increased, but F3 and F4 decreased. It seems that these voice modifications in the real ear contribute to interpreting voice quality and understanding speech, timbre, and individual characteristics, which are influenced by the shape of the outer ear and external ear canal in such a way that formant frequencies become centralized in the vowel space.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.66 no.4
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• pp.715-720
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• 2017

This study tries to analyze morphology and formant frequencies of linear prediction spectra of stethoscope sounds for heart diseased children. For this object, heart diseased stethoscope sounds were collected in the pediatrics of an university hospital. The collected signals were preprocessed and analyzed by the Burg algorithm, a kind of linear prediction analysis. The linear prediction spectra and the formant frequencies of the spectra for the stethoscope sounds for the normal and the diseased children are estimated and compared. The spectra showed outstanding differences in morphology and formant frequencies between the normal and the diseased children. Normal children showed relatively low frequency of F1(the first formant) and small negative slope from F1. VSD children revealed stiff slope change around F1 to F3. Spectra of ASD children is similar with the normal case, but have negative values of F3. F1-F2 difference of the functional murmur children were relatively large.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1-10
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• 2018

This study introduces an automated Praat script allowing optimal formant analysis for children's vowels. Using Burg's algorithm in Praat, formants can be extracted by setting the maximum formant value and the number of formants. The optimal formant setting was determined by identifying the two conditions, F1 and F2, with minimum standard deviations. When applying the optimal formant setting determined by the script, the results of normality tests were not significant among all vowels except /e/ for the maximum formant value, and among the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ and /ʌ/ for the number of formants. This indicates that when analyzing the formants of children's vowel sounds, the unilateral application of a parameter setting (the maximum formant value and the number of formants) to all vowels is problematic. The performance of the optimal formant setting script was evaluated along with 3 different algorithm in order to determine whether it properly extracts formants for children's vowels. To this end, Korean monophghongs of 6-year-old children were collected and the Praat scripts were applied to the data. Resultant Formant plots and statistical analysis showed that optimum_script and qtone_script, which links to the perceptual unit, performed very well in formant extraction compared to the remaining 2 scripts.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.510-515
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• 2001

Generally, there are (1)Words for conversation (2)Tone (3)Pitch (4)Formant frequency (5)Speech speed, etc as the element for emotional recognition from speech signal. For human being, it is natural that the tone, vice quality, speed words are easier elements rather than frequency to perceive other s feeling. Therefore, the former things are important elements fro classifying feelings. And, previous methods have mainly used the former thins but using formant is good for implementing as machine. Thus. our final goal of this research is to implement an emotional recognition system based on pitch, formant, speech speed, etc. from speech signal. In this paper, as first stage we foun specific features of feeling angry from his words when a man got angry.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.41-49
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, syllabic stress information, the location in a word, location in utterance, speech rate of three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The results indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants. The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, the syllabic stress information, the location in a word, the location in an utterance, the speech rate of the three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The result indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.97-108
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• 2019

An automated Praat script was implemented to measure optimal formant frequencies for adults. Optimal formant analysis could be interpreted to show that the deviation of formant frequency that resulted from the two variously combined setting parameters (maximum formant and number of formants) was minimal. To increase the reliability of formant analysis, LPC order should be set differently, based on the gender or vowel type. Praat recommends 5,000 Hz and 5,500 Hz as maximum formant settings and, at the same time, recommends 5 as the number of formants for males and females. However, verification is needed to determine whether these recommended settings are valid for Korean vowels. Statistical analysis showed that formant frequencies significantly varied across the adapted scripts, especially with respect to the data on females. Formant plots and statistical results showed that linear_script and qtone_script are much more reliable in formant measurements. Among four kinds of scripts, the linear and qtone_scripts proved to be more stable and reliable. While the linear_script was designed to have a linearly increased formant step in for-loop, the increment of formant step in the qtone_script was arranged by quarter tone scale (base frequency×common ratio ($\sqrt[24]{2}$)). When looking at the tendency of the formant setting drawn by the two referred algorithms in the context of front vowel [i, e], the maximum formant was set higher; and the number of formants set at a lower value than recommended by Praat. The back vowel [o, u], on the contrary, has a lower maximum formant and a higher number of formants than the standard setting.