• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.4E
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• pp.125-133
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a critical banded wavelet packet-based spectral subtraction for speech enhancement. Critical banded wavelet packet, which reflects the human auditory system, may lead to minimization of intelligibility loss and quality improvement of the enhanced speech in the spectral domain, when combined with an appropriate spectral subtraction gain function. The proposed method shows better performance than the conventional one in comparative assessments. We also show that, for effective evaluation of enhanced speech, it is essential to consider the characteristics of speech quality measures.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.57-60
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a new excitation enhancement technique to improve the speech quality of low bit rate speech coders. The proposed technique is based on a harmonic model and it is employed only in the decoding process of speech coders without any additional bits. We develop the procedure of harmonic model parameters estimation and harmonic generation. and apply the technique to a current state of the art low bit rate speech coder, ITU-T G.729 Annex D. Also its performance is measured by using the ITU-T P.862 PESQ score and compared to those of the phase dispersion filter and the long-term postfilter applied to the decoded excitation. It is shown that the proposed excitation enhancement technique can improve the quality of decoded speech and provide better quality for male speech than other techniques.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.425-434
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• 2016

A novel average magnitude difference function (AMDF)-based pitch detection scheme (PDS) is proposed to achieve better performance in speech quality. A performance evaluation of the proposed PDS is carried out through both a simulation and a real-time implementation of a speech analysis-synthesis system. The parameters used to compare the performance of the proposed PDS with that of PDSs that are based on either a cepstrum, an autocorrelation function (ACF), an AMDF, or circular AMDF (CAMDF) methods are as follows: percentage gross pitch error (%GPE); a subjective listening test; an objective speech quality assessment; a speech intelligibility test; a synthesized speech waveform; computation time; and memory consumption. The proposed PDS results in lower %GPE and better synthesized speech quality and intelligibility for different speech signals as compared to the cepstrum-, ACF-, AMDF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. The computational time of the proposed PDS is also less than that for the cepstrum-, ACF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. Moreover, the total memory consumed by the proposed PDS is less than that for the ACF- and cepstrum-based PDSs.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.259-269
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new excitation enhancement technique to improve the speech quality of low bit-rate code-excited linear prediction (CELP) coders. The proposed technique is based on a harmonic model and it is employed only in the decoding process of speech coders without any additional bits. We develop the procedure of harmonic model parameter estimation and harmonic generation, and apply this technique to a current state-of-the-art low bit rate speech coder, ITU-T G.729 Annex D. Also, its performance is measured by using the ITU-T P.862 PESQ score and compared to those of the phase dispersion filter and the long-term postfilter applied to the decoded excitation. It is shown that the proposed excitation enhancement technique can improve the quality of decoded speech and provide better quality for male speech than other techniques.

• MALSORI
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• v.55
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• pp.119-130
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• 2005

The aim of this paper is to investigate some acoustical characteristics of the voice quality features from the emotional speech database. Six different parameters are measured and compared for 6 different emotions (normal, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, boredom) and from 6 different speakers. Inter-speaker variability and intra-speaker variability are measured. Some intra-speaker consistency of the parameter change across the emotions are observed, but inter-speaker consistency are not observed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1997.06a
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• pp.13-18
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• 1997

Each reproducing speech signal has each particular signal property, because of the processing of encoding and decoding for communications through various media. In this paper, we examine the correlation between speech signal quality and sensory pleasure for the sensory improvement of that signal. In experiments, we evaluate the quality of speech signals through various media by psychological auditory test and physical features of these signals.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.3C
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• pp.234-239
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• 2008

For the efficient coding and transmission, the speech signal can be classified into three distinctive classes: voiced, unvoiced, and transition classes. At low bit rate coding below 4 kbit/s, conventional sinusoidal transform coders synthesize speech of high quality for the purely voiced and unvoiced classes, whereas not for the transition class. The transition class including plosive sound and abrupt voiced-onset has the lack of periodicity, thus it is often classified and synthesized as the unvoiced class. In this paper, the efficient algorithm for the transition class detection is proposed, which demonstrates superior detection performance not only for clean speech but for noisy speech. For the detected transition frame, phase information is transmitted instead of magnitude information for speech synthesis. From the listening test, it was shown that the proposed algorithm produces better speech quality than the conventional one.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.85-94
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• 2003

In this paper an algorithm to reduce the size of Text-to-Speech database is proposed. The algorithm is based on the characteristics of Korean phonemic units. From the initial database, a reduced phoneme unit set is induced by articulatory similarity of concatenating phonemes. Speech data is read by one female announcer for 1000 phonetically balanced sentences. All the recorded speech is then segmented by phoneticians. Total size of the original speech data is about 640 MB including laryngograph signal. To synthesize wave, RE-PSOLA (Residual-Excited Pitch Synchronous Overlap and Add Method) was used. The voice quality of synthesized speech was compared with original speech in terms of spectrographic informations and objective tests. The quality of the synthesized speech is not much degraded when the size of synthesis DB was reduced from 320 MB to 82 MB.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.87-94
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to investigate the speech characteristics and speech therapy of Parkinson disease (PD). This study selected 28 papers published in Korea from 1998 to 2018 after searching the terms 'Parkinson voice' and 'Parkinson speech therapy.' Literature review had been conducted in the two aspects of speech characteristics and speech therapy. The speech characteristics were divided into respiration, phonation, articulation, prosody, vowel production, and voice questionnaire. Speech therapy was divided into Lee Sliverman voice treatment (LSVT) and other voice therapy. PD patients did not differ in respiration function compared to normal elderly people, but their speech and articulation function were poorer. There was also a difference in the speech rate, frequency of pause, and accuracy of vowel production compared with normal elderly people. PD had a lower VHI score and their voice related quality of life was a little poorer. The LSVT was typically used in speech therapy for PD. The methods of speech therapy for PD have been shown to improve respiration and phonation. It is necessary to establish voice norms in PD patients and develop effective speech therapy in the following study.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1991.06a
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• pp.7-10
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• 1991

In a text-to-speech system, sound units (phonemes, words, or phrases, etc.) can be concatenated together to produce required utterance. The quality of the resulting speech is dependent on factors including the phonological/prosodic contour, the quality of basic concatenation units, and how well the units join together. Thus although the quality of each basic sound unit is high, if occur the discontinuity in the concatenation part then the quality of synthesis speech is decrease. To solve this problem, a smoothing operation should be carried out in concatenation parts. But a major problem is that, as yet, no method of parameter smoothing is available for joining the segment together. Thus in this paper, we proposed a new aigorithm that smoothing the unnatural discountinuous parts which can be occured in speech waveform editing. This algorithm used the exponential smoothing method.