• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1997 no.11
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• pp.67-70
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• 1997

In this paper, we evaluated the character of speech of hearing impaired person (HIP) who acquire his hearing loss after the youth. It is usually observed that severe HIP decreased not only speech perception but also vocalization. so there is a need for sensitive and quantitative measures or the assesment of the speech of the HIP to serve both diagnostic and prognosic purposes, 7 HIP and 12 normal hearing person(NHP) were studied with pure tone test and speaking test using word/sentence table which consists of vowel(a:), mono and two syllables and a sentence. we analyzed formant frequency, pitch, sound intensity, speech duration of HIP and NHP speech. According to the results, in the HIP's speech we find that formant frequency was shifted, first-formant prominence was reduced, the dynamic range of sound intensity was decreased, speech duration was prolonged. In the next, we expect the correlation between hearing and speech character of HIP is cleared through analysis of more acoustic parameters and precise selection of HIP group.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.27-31
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• 1998

Nasal sounds include nasalized vowels and consonants. Nasal cavity is important for the acoustics of nasal sounds. Evaluating the effects of site-specific nasal obstruction on nasal sound will help us to understand the importance of nasal geometry for the nasal sound and to foretell voice change after nasal surgery This study was designed to analyze the change of nasality and formant characteristics of nasal sound by obstructing different sites around the ostiomeatal unit(OMU). Ten adult male and female volunteers participated. The nasal formants and bandwidths of nasal consonant /n/ were checked in various conditions of nasal obstruction. The nasalance of rabbit, baby, and mama passages were compared in each conditions. Nasalance of all passages decreased when anterior portion of OMU was obstructed. Center frequency of first nasal formant(NF1) of /n/ has decreased in the order of anterior, inferior obstruction. The bandwidth of NF1 decreased in female with anterior obstruction. Anterior portion of OMU is most critical to the change of nasality and acoustics of nasal consonant. When anterior portion of OMU is obstructed, the shift of NF1 to a lower frequency and the narrowing of NF1 bandwidth are the major acoustic changes of nasal consonant /n/.

• 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 the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.356-365
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• 1988

In this paper, we describe an isolated words recognition system for Korean isolated digits based on a voiced -unvoiced decision algorithm and a frequency domain analysis. The algorithm first performs a voiced-unvoiced decision procedure for the begtinning part of each uttered work using the normalized log energy and zero crossing rate as decision parameters. Based on this decision,. each word is assigned to one of two classes. In order to identify the uttered word within each class, a dynamic time warping algorithm is applied using formant frequencies as the basis for the distance measure. We exploit a pole-zero analysis to measure formant frequencies in each frame. We have observed that pole-zero analysis can provide more accurate estimation of formant frequencies than analysis based on poles only. Experimental recognition rates of 97.3% illustrating the performance of the recognition system was achieved.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.221-228
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problems Korean students, having acoustic structure of Korean vowels, have when they pronounce English vowels by measuring formant frequencies. The experimental results show that the pronunciation of English vowels by Korean students is partially influenced by their Korean vowels. There is little distinction between /i/ and /I/, /U/ and /u/ due to the absence of short and long vowels in Korean pronunciation. Also, as observed in typical Korean vowel pronunciation, there is little difference between the F1 values of /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\{\ae}$/ by Korean speakers, resulting in inaccurate English pronunciation. In addition, compared to English native speakers, Korean speakers show the biggest difference in F1 value of /c/. The fact that they make pronunciation of /c/ covering /e/, /$\Lambda$/ and /c/ positions probably accounts for such phenomenon. The results of this experiment show the interference of Korean that occurred in some English vowels by native Korean speakers.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07c
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• pp.1799-1802
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• 2002

This paper proposes an improved method for formant frequencies estimation based on the complex autocorrelation function of the speech signal. Instead of using the incoming signal as an input fur the LPC analysis, the analytic signal of the autocorrelation function of the speech signal is computed and itself used as an input for the LPC analysis. Due to the properties of the analytic signal, which occupies half of the bandwidth of the original signal, the required model order for the LPC analysis is halved. The accuracy of the proposed method in noisy environments is examined on five natural vowels. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by the estimated spectral shapes and the estimation errors of the formant frequencies.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.2E
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• pp.31-38
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• 1999

This paper focuses on extracting formants from transfer function, derived from linear prediction analysis of speech signal. The second derivative of the log magnitude spectrum of the transfer function, the first and third derivatives of the phase spectrum of the transfer function in the z-plane are discussed. Their resolutions of detecting formants are analyzed and some comparisons are given. Theoretical analyses and experimental results show that the third derivative of the phase spectrum decays more rapidly around the formant locations than the first derivative of the phase spectrum and the second derivative of the log magnitude spectrum. Compared with the second derivative of the log spectrum and the first derivative of the phase spectrum, the third derivative of the phase spectrum has higher resolution in frequency domain and provides more accurate formant extraction.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.1919-1926
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• 2016

The people who complain of pain due to voice causes such as vocal cord nodules is increasing year by year. If the voice is changed, it is possible to give to colleagues discomfort or inconvenience during conversation. In this paper, we propose a way to reduce discomfort by improving the husky voice during the conversation. A VBF (voice boosting filter) is firstly designed to improve the husky voices. This filter may further emphasize the formant frequency components than the frequency components around the formant frequency, because the value is relatively greater than the other frequency. And a fixed-point type DSP chipset, TMS320F2812 is applied to the system, the operating frequency is 150MHz. The system was implemented as a compact for use as a portable, its size is $2.5cm{\times}10cm$. Through the test using three husky voices with some type of statement, it was satisfactory in processing speed and sound quality improvement.

• 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.