• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.7-15
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• 2004

In this paper, we develop a vowel training assistant method using vowel formant statistics. Formant statistics were obtained from a PBW set consisting of 452 words from 8 persons. Then we calculated distance from input formants to each center of vowel formant space. Based on the distance, directions could be given to correct the speaker's manner of articulations, i.e. position of jaw and tongue.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.39-51
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• 2008

Formant measurements are one of the most important factors to objectively test cross-linguistic differences among vowels produced by speakers of any given languages. However, many speech analysis softwares present erroneous estimates and some researchers use them without any verification procedures. The purposes of this paper are to examine formant measurements of complex waves which were synthesized from the average formant values of five Korean vowels using three default methods in Praat and to verify the measured values of the five vowels produced by 20 students using one of the methods. Variances along the time axis are discussed after determining absolute difference sum from the 1/3 vowel duration point. Results show that there were smaller measurement errors by the burg method. Also, greater errors were observed in the sl or lpc methods mostly caused by the inappropriate formant settings. Formant measurement deviations were greater in those vowels produced by the female students than those of the male students, which were mostly attributed to the settings for the vowels /o, u/. Formant settings can best be corrected by changing the number of formants to the number of visible dark bands on the spectrogram. Those results suggest that researchers should check the validity of the estimates from the speech analysis software. Further studies are recommended on the perception test of the original sound with the synthesized sound by the estimated formant values.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.26-32
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• 2014

Mental fatigue is inevitable in the workplace. Since mental fatigue can lead to decreased efficiency and critical accidents, it is important to manage mental fatigue from the viewpoint of accident prevention. An experiment was performed to evaluate mental fatigue using the formant frequency analysis of human voices. The experimental task was to mentally add or subtract two one-digit numbers. After completing the tasks with four different levels of mental fatigue, subjects were asked to read Korean vowels and their voices were recorded. Five vowel sounds of "아", "어", "오", "우", and "이" from the voice recorded were then used to extract formant 1 frequency. Results of separate ANOVAs showed significant main effects of mental fatigue on formant 1 frequencies of all five vowels concerned. However, post-hoc comparisons revealed that formant 1 frequencies of "아" and "어" were most sensitive to mental fatigue level employed in this experiment. Formant 1 frequencies of "아" and "어" significantly decrease as the mental fatigue accumulates. The formant frequency extracted from human voice would be potentially applicable for detecting mental fatigue induced during industrial tasks.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.157-162
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• 2015

This study reports on the effective way of displaying dynamic formant information on F1-F2 space. Conventional ways of F1-F2 space (different name of vowel triangle or vowel rectangle) have been used for investigating vowel characteristics of a speaker or a language based on statistics of the F1 and F2 values, which were computed by spectral envelope search method. Those methods were dealing mainly with the static information of the formants, not the changes of the formant values (i.e. dynamic information). So a better way of investigating dynamic informations from the formant values of speech signal is suggested so that more convenient and detailed investigation of the dynamic changes can be achieved on F1-F2 space. Suggested method used visualization of static and dynamic information in overlapped way to be able to observe the change of the formant information easily. Finally some examples of the implemented display on some cases of the continuous vowels are shown to prove the usefulness of suggested method.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.28B no.10
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• pp.755-760
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• 1991

In this paper, we propose a new formant locus overlapping method which can effectively enhance a naturalness of synthetic speech produced by ddemisyllable based Korean text-to-speech system. At first, Korean demisyllables are divided into several number of segments which have linear formant transition characteristics. Then, database, which is composed of start point and length of each formant segments, is provided. When we synthesize speech with these demisyllable database, we concatenate each formant locus by using a proposed overlapping method which can closely simulate haman articulation mechanism. We have implemented a Korean text-to-speech system by using this method and proved that the formant loci of synthetic speech are similar to those of the natural speech. Finally, we could illustrate that the resulting spectrograms of proposed method are more similar to natural speech than those of conventional method.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.64 no.11
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• pp.1605-1610
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• 2015

This study describes a new method to analyze phonocardiogram acquired from electronic stethoscope. The method uses the formant frequencies of linear prediction spectrum of the phonocardiogram and proposes a novel method for formant detection using the smoothing and the first and second derivatives. For this, stethoscope sounds are acquired in university hospital. The stethoscope signals are preprocessed and analyzed by the Burg algorithm, a kind of linear prediction analysis. Based on the linear prediction spectra, the formant frequencies are estimated. The proposed method has shown better performance in formant frequency detection than the conventional peak picking method.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.141-144
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• 2003

In this paper, we compared formant frequency extraction algorithms with various conditions, and show their performances. The formant frequency is the resonance frequency which is decided by the vocal tract characteristics. It is related with phonemes, or characteristics of the physical condition of the vocal track. Since the speech signal is influenced by both the sound source and the vocal tract, it is difficult to calculate the exact formant frequencies. Many studies on the formant frequency extraction had been executed already Besides, any new formant frequency extraction algorithm is hardly found recently.

• 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.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.139-144
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• 2013

Objective: The current study investigated a non-obtrusive measure for detecting physical fatigue based on the analysis of formant frequencies of human voice. Background: Fatigue has been considered as a main cause in industrial and traffic accidents. Therefore, it is critical to detect worker's fatigue for accident prevention. Method: After running exercises on a treadmill, participants were instructed to read a sentence and their voices were recorded under four different physical fatigue levels. Korean vowels of "아", "어", "오", "우", and "이" from the voice recorded were then used to collect formant 1 frequencies. Results: Results of separate ANOVAs showed a significant main effect of physical fatigue on formant 1 frequency of "아", "어", and "이". Furthermore, post-hoc comparisons revealed that formant 1 frequency of "아" was most sensitive to physical fatigue level employed in this experiment. Conclusion: Formant 1 frequencies of some vowels significantly decrease as the physical fatigue level increases. Application: Potential application of this study includes the development of a measure of physical fatigue state that is free from sensor attachment and requires little preparation.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.529-534
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• 2009

One of the characteristics of the hearing impaired is that their frequency selectivity is poorer than that of the normal hearing. To compensate this, formant enhancement algorithms and spectral contrast enhancement algorithms have been developed. However in some cases, these algorithms fail to improve the frequency selectivity of the hearing impaired. One of the reasons is the acoustic masking among enhanced formants. In this study, we tried to enhance the formants based on the individual masking characteristic of each subject. The masking characteristic used in this study was minimum level difference (MLD) between the first formant to the second formant while acoustic masking was occurred. If the level difference between the two formants in each frame is larger than the MLD, the gain of the first formant was decreased to reduce the acoustic masking that occurred among formants. As a result of the speech discrimination test, using formant enhanced speeches, speech discrimination score (SDS) of the speeches having differently enhanced formants was significantly superior to SDS of the speeches having equally enhanced formants. It means that suppression of the acoustic masking among formants improve frequency selectivity of the hearing impaired.