• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.27 no.3A
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• pp.196-204
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• 2002

The Sinusoidal Transform Coding(STC) is a vocoding scheme based on a sinusoidal model of a speech signal. The low bit-rate speech coding based on sinusoidal model is a method that models and synthesizes speech with fundamental frequency and its harmonic elements, spectral envelope and phase in the frequency region. In this paper, we propose the 2.4kbps low-rate speech coding algorithm using the sinusoidal model of a speech signal. In the proposed coder, the pitch frequency is estimated by choosing the frequency that makes least mean squared error between synthetic speech with all spectrum peaks and speech synthesized with chosen frequency and its harmonics. The spectral envelope is estimated using SEEVOC(Spectral Envelope Estimation VOCoder) algorithm and the discrete all-pole model. The phase information is obtained using the time of pitch pulse occurrence, i.e., the onset time, as well as the phase of the vocal tract system. Experimental results show that the synthetic speech preserves both the formant and phase information of the original speech very well. The performance of the coder has been evaluated in terms of the MOS test based on informal listening tests, and it achieved over the MOS score of 3.1.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 1999.10b
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• pp.198-200
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• 1999

인간이 발성하는 음성에는 의미에 대한 정보 뿐만 아니라 화자의 성별에 따라 고유한 특성을 가지고 있다. 즉 음성은 고음이 강한 여성음성과 남성음성으로 분류할 수 있다. 그러나, 기존의 HMM을 이용한 음성인식시스템에서는 남성과 여성음성의 이러한 특성이 있음에도 불구하고 이를 고려하지 않고, 하나의 HMM으로 구성하고 있다. 본 논문에서 제시하는 알고리즘으로 실험한 결과 남성과 여성의 포만트 주파수가 100~30Hzck이가 나는 것을 알 수 있었고, 이러한 특성을 고려하여 남성과 여성의 음성을 구별할 수 있는 방법을 제안한다. 또한 남성과 여성음성을 각각 구분하여 GMM을 훈련시킨 후 인식과정에서 입력된 음성의 포만트 특성에 따라 남성음성이면 남성 HMM으로 여성음성이면 여성 HMM으로 인식을 수행함으로써 기존의 인식방법보다 남성음성은 5.2% 여성음성은 4.4% 향상된 결과를 얻었다.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.24-32
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• 1991

Cleft palate or velopharyngeal incompetence shows many disorders and disabilities affecting speech transmission. including distortion. substitution. and the nasalization of the vowels. The nasalized vowels are produced primarily by lowering of the velum. resulting in opening a side passage for the air flow through the nasal cavity. These abnormal movements give rise to complex modification of the physical property of the sound or in the sound spectrum. The authors employed Sonagraph$^{\circledR}$ as a sound analyzer in order to ascertain the features which characterize the nasalization of vowels. Twenty healthy Korean male adult voluteers were analyzed in artificial conditions of anterior and posterior nasal obstruction. and velo-pharyngeal incompetence. The results were as follows : 1) Fundamental frequency was not changed by nasal obstruction or velopharyngeal incompetence. 2) There was no significant difference of the formant intensity between normal and nasal vowels. 3) In VPI, a decrease of the frequency of $F_2$ was observed in /e/ and /i/ vowels(p<0.001). 4) In VPI, the $F_2$ was frequently missed in /o/ and /u/ vowels. 5) In the consonant spectra of VPI, the 'release burst' was usually not observed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.65-74
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• 2020

This study aims to compare the acoustic characteristics of vowel phonation in children with spastic and dyskinetic cerebral palsy (CP). Thirty-four children aged 4-12 years with CP participated in the study (spastic 26, dyskinetic 8). Voice samples for the acoustic analysis were extracted from a sustained vowel /a/. All acoustic measures were made using Praat. Group differences were compared by an independent t-test or Welch-Aspin test, if the equivalence assumption was not met. The results of this study are as follow. First, maximum phonation time(MPT) was significantly shorter for the dyskinetic CP than for the spastic CP. Second, shimmer percent was significantly increased in the dyskinetic CP than in the spastic CP. Lastly, there were no significant group differences in both the first formant and the second formant. These findings indicate that the dyskinetic CP has a poorer respiratory capacity and poorer laryngeal function than the spastic CP. On the other hand, both groups have a comparable ability to articulate the vowel /a/. The results of the present study help speech language pathologists identify the speech motor control ability of children with two types of CP (spastic and dyskinetic) and help to make an intervention plan associated with a specific type of CP.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.4E
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• pp.144-151
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• 2005

We evaluate the performance of emotion recognition via speech signals when a plain speaker talks to an entertainment robot. For each frame of a speech utterance, we extract the frame-based features: pitch, energy, formant, band energies, mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and velocity/acceleration of pitch and MFCCs. For discriminative classifiers, a fixed-length utterance-based feature vector is computed from the statistics of the frame-based features. Using a speaker-independent database, we evaluate the performance of two promising classifiers: support vector machine (SVM) and hidden Markov model (HMM). For angry/bored/happy/neutral/sad emotion classification, the SVM and HMM classifiers yield $42.3\%\;and\;40.8\%$ accuracy, respectively. We show that the accuracy is significant compared to the performance by foreign human listeners.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.64-66
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to compare and analyze some acoustic parameters of the cochlear implanted children(N=20, aged 3-10) and to suggest a basic data on speech rehabilitaion for the cochlear implanted children. Acoustic analyses of seven Korean monophthongs produced by 4 contexts(V, CV, VC, CVC) were conducted for the cochler implanted children and normal hearing children(N=20, aged 3-10). Subjects were asked to pronounce a list of vowel repeating three times. The results of this study are the same as follows: First, in the case of the cochlear implanted group, there were no significant differences in F1 and F2. Second, in the case of the normal hearing group, there were significant differences in F2 /ㅜ/ between V and CVC, between VC and CVC. Third, there were significant differences in F1, F2 between CI group and normal hearing group.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.83-90
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• 2000

The purpose of this study was to examine some acoustic characteristics in the ear canal. It was assumed that a sound outside the external auditory canal could be different from the sound inside the external auditory canal. The acoustic signals were captured by a probe microphone placed at a distance within 1 cm from the tympanic membrane, and a reference microphone was placed over the upper pinna. Three vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ were recorded from a normal adult male speaker. The parameters such as the formant frequency ($Fl\simF5$) and the peak intensity were measured using a speech analyser, PCquirer. It was found that the entering part of the external auditory canal functions as a narrowing point as to the speech that passes through the free field. Results show that acoustic characteristics were changed for speech discrimination rather than speech perception.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.90-94
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• 1996

Code Excited Linear Prediction(CELP) vocoder exhibits good performance at data rates below 8 kbps. The major drawback of CELP type coders is a large amount of computation. In this paper, we propose a new pitch searching method that preserves the quality of the CELP vocoder reducing computational complexity. The basic idea is that grasps preliminary pitches using the first formant of speech signal and performs pitch search only about the preliminary pitches. As applying the proposed method to the CELP vocoder, we can reduce complexity by 64% in the pitch search.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.143-145
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• 2007

Muscle groups that are located in and around the vocal tract can produce audible changes in frequency and/or intensity of the voice. Vocal vibrato is a characteristic feature in the singing of performers trained in the western classical tradition and vibrato is generally considered to result from modulation in frequency amplitude and timbre. Vocal tremor is also characterized by periodic fluctuations in the voice frequency or intensity and vocal tremor is symptom of a neurological disease as Spasmodic dysphonia , Parkinson's disease. Vocal vibrato and Vocal tremor may have many of the same origins and mechanisms in the voice production systems. The purpose of this study is to find acostic character of Korean traditional song Pansori singer's vibrato and Spasmodic dysphonia patient's vocal tremor. twelve Pansori singers and seven Spasmodic dysponia patients participated to this study. Power spectrum and Real time Spectrogram are used to analyze the acoustic characteristics of Pansori singing and Spasmodic dysphonia patient's voice The results are as follows; First, vowel formant differences between Pansori singing and Spasmodic dysphonia patient's voice are higher F1, F3. Second, The vibrato rate show differences between Pansori singing and Spasmodic dysphonia patients;$4^{\sim}6/sec$ and $5{\sim}6/sec$ Vibrato rate of pitch is 5.7 Hz ${\sim}$ 42.4 Hz for Pansori singing , 3.8 Hz ${\sim}$ 27.9 Hz for Spasmodic dysphonia patients ;Vibrato rate of intensity range is 0.07 dB ${\sim}$ 8.26 dB for Pansori singing and 0.07 dB ${\sim}$ 4.81 dB for Spasmodic dysphonia patients

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.44-58
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• 1994

The formants of the 9 Korean standard vowels(which used by the average people of Seoul, central-area of the Korean peninsula) were measured by analysis with the linear predictive coding(LPC) and fast Fourier transform(FFT). The author already had reported the constriction area for the Korean standard vowels, and with the existing data, the distance from glottis to the constriction area in the vocal tract of each vowel was newly measured with videovelopharyngograms and lateral Rontgenograms of the vocal tract. We correlated the formant frequencies with the distance from glottis to the constriction area of the vocal tract. Also we tried to correlate the formant frequencies with the position of tongue in the vocal tract which is divided into 2 categories : The position of tongue in oral cavity by the distance from imaginary palatal line to the highest point of tongue and the position in pharyngeal cavity by the distance from back of tongue to posterior pharyngeal wall. This study was performed with 10 adults(male : 5, female : 5) who spoke primary 9 Korean standard vowels. We had already reported that the Korean vowel [i], [e], $[{\varepsilon}]$ were articulated at hard palate level, [$\dot{+}$], [u] were at soft palate level, [$\wedge$] was at upper pharynx level and the [$\wedge$], [$\partial$], [a] in a previous article. Also we had noted that the significance of pharyngeal cavity in vowel articulation. From this study we have concluded that ; 1) The F$_1$ is related with the oral cavity articulated vowel [i, e, $\varepsilon$, $\dot{+}$, u]. 2) Within the oral cavity articulated vowel [i, e, $\varepsilon$, $\dot{+}$, u] and the upper pharynx articulated vowel [o], the F$_2$ is elevated when the diatance from glottis to the constriction area is longer. But within the lower pharynx articulated vowel [$\partial$, $\wedge$, a], the F$_2$ is elevated when the distance from glottis to the constriction area is shorter. 3) With the stronger tendency of back-vowel, the higher the elevation of the F$_1$ and F$_2$ frequencies. 4) The F$_3$ and F$_4$ showed no correaltion with the constriction area nor the position of tongue in the vocal tract 5) The parameter F$_2$- F$_1$, which is the difference between F$_2$ frequency and F$_1$ frequency showed an excellent indicator of differenciating the oral cavity articulated vowels from pharyngeal cavity articulated vowels. If the F$_2$-F$_1$ is less than about 600Hz which indicates the vowel is articulated in the pharyngeal cavity, and more than about 600Hz, which indicates that the vowel is articulated in the oral cavity.