• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.77-89
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• 2017

This study investigates the phonetic meaning of clarity and turbidity(淸濁) that has been used in psychoacoustics, musicology, and linguistics in both the East and the West. With a view to clarifying the phonetic meaning of clarity and turbidity, this study conducts three perception tests. First, 34 subjects were asked to take one of Clear and Turbid by forced choice for 5 pure and complex tones, respectively, ranging from A2 to A6 differing by octave. Second, they were asked to select between the two choices for 25 pure and complex tones, respectively, ranging from A2 to A4 differing by semitone. Third, they were asked to opt for one of the two choices for 8 different vowels of different formant and fundamental frequencies. Results showed that there is a certain range of tone which is perceived as clear, that clarity level increases as fundamental frequency increases, and that pure tones have a higher level of clarity than complex ones, fundamental frequency being equal. Results also showed that vocal tract resonance enhances clarity level on the whole, and that lower vowels have a higher level of clarity than higher ones. This study is significant in that it demonstrates that clarity level is proportional to fundamental frequency and the first formant frequency, all else being equal.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.191-194
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• 2002

The nursing vocalization of domestic pigs(Landrace$\times$Yorkshire) was investigated with respect to common features. All vocalizations uttered during nursings in 5 sows at 5 days after farrowing were recorded and 305 grunts were processed in a spectrograph. The sow's repeated grunting during nursing can be regarded as a contact call and a signal of the mother to start and synchronize the suckling behavior of the piglets. Analysis in the time domain revealed the gross structure of the call, whereas in the frequency domain the fine structure of single grunts was investigated. Nursing interval, duration of nursing behavior, duration of grunt, grunt rate per 10 seconds, fundamental frequency, 1 formant, 2 formant, 3 formant, 4 formant and spectrum were investigated. The results showed that mean interval between the nursing following one another was 25, 4.6 min and duration of nursing behavior was 3.2 $\pm$ 0.7 min. Average duration of grunt was 203.9 $\pm$ 63.6 ms. The formant contours could be identified. The nursing behavior might be disturbed by the grunts of alien sow.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.59-72
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• 2000

Vocal tract resonances are of paramount importance to voice sounds. Resonance frequencies determine vowel quality and the personal voice timber. The aim of this study was to make an effective diction program according to tuning formant frequencies by adjusting the vocal tract shape in professional voice users. Twelve male student singers and eleven female student singers participated in this study. The subjects repeated five simple vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ in normal speech and singing. The spoken vowels and sung vowels were measured by formant frequencies and the singer's formant frequencies using CSL and DSP Sona-Graph. Separately, Plot formants program was used to draw the vowel chart. The results were as follows. (1) Total formant frequencies of female singers were 11% higher than those of males singers in singing. (2) The F1 and F3 of sung vowels increased compared to F1 and F3 spoken vowels. However, The F2 of sung vowels decreased in comparison with F2 of spoken vowels. (3) Posterior vowel /u/ were moved anteriorly. This phenomenon seemed to be due to head voice singing training. (4) Singer's formant frequencies in student singers appeared according to the part: 2560 Hz for baritone, 2760 Hz for Tenor, 2821 Hz for Mezzo soprano and 3420 Hz for soprano.

• MALSORI
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• no.58
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• pp.19-34
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• 2006

The present study investigates the vowels of Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia in terms of the first two formant frequencies and provides a three-dimensional formant chart of vowels by plotting F1, F2, and the frequency of datapoints on 4 different scales: Hz, mel, bark, and the number of ERB. For this study, we recruited 30 male native speakers of Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia (15 each) which include 6 vowels (i, e, a, o, u, e) in various contexts. The three-dimensional formant chart showed geophysics of vowel space, such that mountain peaks stand in particular locations with a higher frequency of occurrence of datapoints. The geophysics of vowel space may shed lights on the perceptual structure of vowel space. The results also showed that vowels in utterance-final positions have a significantly higher F1 and a significantly lower F2 than those in utterance-medial or utterance-initial positions, which means that vowels in utterance-final positions are more back and lower in vowel space than those in utterance-medial or utterance-initial positions.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.12-18
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• 1991

Detecting the fundamental frequency(Fo) of the speech signal is a problem in many speech applications. A problem of the pitch detection method in the frequency domain is occurred by the first formant and the background noise. Thus, in this paper, we proposed a pitch detection algorithm in the frequency domain that reduces the effects of the first formant and the background noise by the spectral AMDF function. Several computer simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm was very effective for fundamental frequency detection.

• MALSORI
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• no.67
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• pp.33-60
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• 2008

The aim of this study is to show the differences in acoustic parameters between a pathological voice /a/ caused by vocal polyp and a normal voice /a/ produced after LMS (Laryngeal Microscopic Surgery). It was expected that voices of two kinds could be analyzed effectively in terms of HNR in specific frequency bands than in all frequency bands. For this study, 10 patients' voice were recorded before and after LMS and then were manipulated in terms of four acoustic parameter. It was found out that (a) frequency bands of 500Hz in the range of 1,000Hz to 4,000Hz were very useful to obtain HNR values; (b) frequency bands in the range of 1,248Hz to 5,500Hz on a log scale were very useful to obtain HNR values; (c) F0 dropped after LMS but not significantly; (d) the bandwidth of the second formant (B2) decreased significantly after LMS, while that of the first formant (B1) decreased after LMS but not significantly.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.43-52
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• 2005

The common form of pre-emphasis filter is $H(z)\;=\;1\;- az^{-1}$, where a typically lies between 0.9 and 1.0 in voiced signal. Also, this value reflects the degree of filter and equals R(1)/R(0) in Auto-correlation method. This paper proposes a new flattening algorithm to compensate the weaked high frequency components that occur by vocal cord characteristic. We used interval information of LSP to estimate formant frequency. After obtaining the value of slope and inverse slope using linear interpolation among formant frequency, flattening process is followed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm flattened the weaked high frequency components effectively. That is, we could improve the flattened characteristics by using interval information of LSP as flattening factor at the process that compensates weaked high frequency components.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.45-52
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to measure the first two vowel formants of the ten young female speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] automatically and then to analyze various potential factors that may affect the formant distribution of the eight peripheral vowels of English. The factors that were analyzed included 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 results indicate that the overall formant patterns of the female speakers were similar to those of earlier works. The effects of the factors on the realization of the two formants were also similar to those from the male speakers with minor differences.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.91-99
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• 2014

Speaking styles tend to have an influence on spectral characteristics of produced speech. There are not many studies on the spectral characteristics of speech because of complicated processing of too much spectral data. The purpose of this study was to examine spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by nine American males with different speaking styles: clear or conversational styles; high- or low-pitched voices. Praat was used to collect pitch-corrected long-term averaged spectra and bandwidths of the first two formants of eleven vowels in the speaking styles. Results showed that the spectral characteristics of the vowels varied systematically according to the speaking styles. The clear speech showed higher spectral energy of the vowels than that of the conversational speech while the high-pitched voice did the same over the low-pitched voice. In addition, front and back vowel groups showed different spectral characteristics. Secondly, there was no statistically significant difference between B1 and B2 in the speaking styles. B1 was generally lower than B2 when reflecting the source spectrum and radiation effect. However, there was a statistically significant difference in B2 between the front and back vowel groups. The author concluded that spectral characteristics reflect speaking styles systematically while bandwidths measured at a few formant frequency points do not reveal style differences properly. Further studies would be desirable to examine how people would evaluate different sets of synthetic vowels with spectral characteristics or with bandwidths modified.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.133-135
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• 2008

Background and Objectives: The voice changes can occur in peritonsillar abscess and the labeling of this changes as a "muffled voice". The aim of this study was to investigate the changes in acoustic feature of voice before and after treatment in patients with peritonsillar abscess. Materials and Method: 12 patients with peritonsillar abscess were enrolled in the study. Acoustic analysis on sustained Korean vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/ were performed before and after treatment. Results: In patients with peritonsillar abscess, the first formant frequency (F1) and second formant frequency (F2) of /a/ were decreased. There was tendency of articulation of back-low vowel /a/ as back-high vowel /u/. F1 of /i/ and /u/ were increased, while F2 were decreased. There was tendency of articulation of front-high vowel /i/ as back-low vowel /a/. The third, forth, fifth formant frequency (F3, F4, F5) of /a/, /i/ and /u/ were decreased although statistically not significant. Conclusion: The anatomical and functional changes of oropharynx by peritonsillar abscess can cause changes in resonance and speech quality. We suggest that these changes could be the cause of 'muffled voice' in patients of peritonsillar abscess.