• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.131-138
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• 2015

The aim of this work is to compare the vowel formants of the ten adult female speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Seoul corpus[7] with those of corresponding Korean male speakers from the same corpus and of American female speakers from the Buckeye corpus[4]. In addition, various linguistic factors that are expected affect the formant frequencies were examined to account for the distribution of the vowel formants. Formant frequencies extracted from the Seoul corpus were also compared to those from read speech. The results showed that the formant distribution of the spontaneous speech was very different from that of the read speech, while the comparison between the female and male speakers was similar in both languages. To a greater or lesser degree, the potential linguistic factors influenced the formant frequencies of the vowels.

• Journal of Sasang Constitutional Medicine
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.50-59
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• 2003

Purpose Five animals sounds which are come under five sounds(Gong, Sang, jiao, zhi, yu) which are compared with the musical scale. It is looking for similarity between five animals' sounds and the musical scale. Methods 녹음 record 1 ig machine 1. Five animals (cattle, horse, pheasant, pig, sheep) sounds has been recording on tape. 2. That was transfer to CSL(computerized speech lab) 3. That was analysed to pitch, formant 1,2,3. energy pitch 4. That analysed result (Pitch, formant 1,2,3. energy ratio) of five animals are calculated and compared with the five musical scale(five sounds) Result The ratio of five animals sounds is not consistent with the musical scale in any five item (pitch, formant 1,2,3. energy). Conclusion 1.The five musical scale has no similarity with the five animals sounds 2.The five sound is supposed to oriented form theoretical back ground of five-going not have no relative with the five animals sounds

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.06d
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• pp.381-384
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• 2002

In speech signal processing, it Is very important to detect the pitch exactly in speech recognition, synthesis and analysis. but, it is very difficult to pitch detection from speech signal because of formant and transition amplitude affect. therefore, in this paper, we proposed a pitch detection using the spectrum flattening techniques. Spectrum flattening is to eliminate the formant and transition amplitude affect. In time domain, positive center clipping is process in order to emphasize pitch period with a glottal component of removed vocal tract characteristic. And rough formant envelope is computed through peak-fitting spectrum of original speech signal in frequency domain. As a results, well get the flattened harmonics waveform with the algebra difference between spectrum of original speech signal and smoothed formant envelope. After all, we obtain residual signal which is removed vocal tract element The performance was compared with LPC and Cepstrum, ACF 0wing to this algorithm, we have obtained the pitch information improved the accuracy of pitch detection and gross error rate is reduced in voice speech region and in transition region of changing the phoneme.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-71
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• 2007

The severe-profound hearing impaired children have various disorders in everday communication due to the lack of hearing feedback. Especially, their speech produced unstable voice, omission and distortion of articulation, pitch break, cul-de-sac voice, and so on so that they were difficult to accurately deliver an intended message. This study attempts to analyze the acoustic characteristics of 4 vowel sounds produced by 35 severe-profound hearing impaired children using CSL(Computerized Speech Lab, Model 4300b). The formant data were obtained from the spectrogram and analyzed data by 12 formant filter and auto-correlation among the formants. Results showed that the hearing impaired children's formant values came out very high. They produced the vowels at the mode of hypertension with unstable voice. In order to improve their speech, they would need some adequate auditory feedback.

• 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.6 no.2
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• pp.55-64
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• 2014

This study measured formant bandwidths of profound hearing impaired children and examined the characteristics of their articulation. For this study, 10 cochlear implanted children(CI), 10 hearing aid children(HA) and 10 normal hearing children(NH) were asked to read 7 Korean vowels(/ɑ, ʌ, o, u, ɯ, i, ɛ/). The subjects' readings were recorded by NasalView and analyzed by Praat. The analysis of the formant bandwidths explains the degree of vocal fold opening and the characteristics of radiation. Through the analysis of formant bandwidth, we can see that the hearing-impaired maintain vocal fold tension when they speak high vowels and characteristics of radiation. Narrower B1 means better maintain vocal fold tension, wider B2 means more front and wider B3 means the rounder lips. CI's B1 was widest and NH's was narrowest. And females' B1 was wider than males'. Among vowels, B1 of /a/ was widest, and B1 of /i/ was narrowest. In the case of B2, HA and NH's B2 was wider than CI's. Females' B2 was wider than males'. And B2 of /i/ was widest, and B2 of /ʌ/ was narrowest. In the case of B3, NH's was widest, and CI's was narrowest. Males' was wider than females'. Among vowels, B3 of /o/ was widest, and B3 of /ɛ/ was narrowest. As a result, first, through the analysis of B1, we can find that NH and males could better maintain vocal fold tension than the hearing-impaired or females, and all children articulate /i/ with vocal fold tension than other vowels. Second, through the analysis of B2, NH and HA articulate vowels with the weaker rounded than CI does. And females articulate vowels with the weaker rounded than males do. Third, through the analysis of B3, NH articulate vowels with the rounder than HA or CI do, and males articulate vowels with the rounder than females do. Through the results, we can expect that the analysis of formant bandwidth will be applied to the therapy of articulation for the hearing-impaired with hearing aids or cochlear implant.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.98-104
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• 1996

This paper propose the alteraton rule to compensate a formant trasition of several connected vowels for improving an unnatural synthesized continuous speech which is concatenated by each demisyllable without coarticulated formant transition for use in dmisyllable based synthesis by rule. To fullfill each formant transition part, the database of 42 stationary vowels which are segmented from the stable part of each vowels is appended to the one of Korean demisyllables, and the resonance circuit used in formant synthesis is employed to change the formant frequency of speech signals. To evaluate the synthesied speech by this rule, we carried out the alteration rule for connected vowels of the synthesized speech based on demisyllable, and compare spectrogram and MOS tested scores with the original and the demisyllable based synthesized speech without this rule. The result shows that this proposed rule can synthesize the more natural speech.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.271-279
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• 2007

We suggest a novel method for the evaluation of cochlear implant (CI) speech processing strategy based on neural spike train decoding. From formant trajectories of input speech and auditory nerve responses responding to the electrical pulse trains generated from a specific CI speech processing strategy, optimal linear decoding filter was obtained, and used to estimate formant trajectory of incoming speech. Performance of a specific strategy is evaluated by comparing true and estimated formant trajectories. We compared a newly-developed strategy rooted from a closer mimicking of auditory periphery using nonlinear time-varying filter, with a conventional linear-filter-based strategy. It was shown that the formant trajectories could be estimated more exactly in the case of the nonlinear time-varying strategy. The superiority was more prominent when background noise level is high, and the spectral characteristic of the background noise was close to that of speech signals. This confirms the superiority observed from other evaluation methods, such as acoustic simulation and spectral analysis.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.122-126
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• 2002

In this study, we find features of 3 emotions (Happiness, Angry, Surprise) as the fundamental research of emotion recognition. Speech signal with emotion has several elements. That is, voice quality, pitch, formant, speech speed, etc. Until now, most researchers have used the change of pitch or Short-time average power envelope or Mel based speech power coefficients. Of course, pitch is very efficient and informative feature. Thus we used it in this study. As pitch is very sensitive to a delicate emotion, it changes easily whenever a man is at different emotional state. Therefore, we can find the pitch is changed steeply or changed with gentle slope or not changed. And, this paper extracts formant features from speech signal with emotion. Each vowels show that each formant has similar position without big difference. Based on this fact, in the pleasure case, we extract features of laughter. And, with that, we separate laughing for easy work. Also, we find those far the angry and surprise.

• 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.