• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.5588-5593
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• 2011

In this paper, measure of change the speech analysis parameter by stimulating ears blood points corresponding to cardiac. To do this, we collected voice of before and after a stimulation corresponding points to ears to select normal heart having 10 subjects. We analyzed changes before and after corresponding points to ear in cardiac to apply Jitter, the second zFormant Frequency Bandwidths related to heart of elements of voice analysis. As a result of us experiment, we were able to analyze correlation of voice with cardiac according to corresponding points to ears decreased values of Jitter, the Second Formant Frequency Bandwidths of 90% of subjects. Finally, the effectiveness of proposed method is demonstrated by several experiments.

• 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.

• 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.21 no.4
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• pp.361-373
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• 2002

In this paper, we propose a channel normalization method to improve the performance of CMS (cepstral mean subtraction) which is widely adopted to normalize a channel variation for speech and speaker recognition. CMS which estimates the channel effects by averaging long-term cepstrum has a weak point that the estimated channel is biased by the formants of voiced speech which include a useful speech information. The proposed Formant-broadened Cepstral Mean Subtraction (FBCMS) is based on the facts that the formants can be found easily in log spectrum which is transformed from the cepstrum by fourier transform and the formants correspond to the dominant poles of all-pole model which is usually modeled vocal tract. The FBCMS evaluates only poles to be broadened from the log spectrum without polynomial factorization and makes a formant-broadened cepstrum by broadening the bandwidths of formant poles. We can estimate the channel cepstrum effectively by averaging formant-broadened cepstral coefficients. We performed the experiments to compare FBCMS with CMS, PFCMS using 4 simulated telephone channels. In the experiment of channel estimation, we evaluated the distance cepstrum of real channel from the cepstrum of estimated channel and found that we were able to get the mean cepstrum closer to the channel cepstrum due to an softening the bias of mean cepstrum to speech. In the experiment of text-independent speaker identification, we showed the result that the proposed method was superior than the conventional CMS and comparable to the pole-filtered CMS. Consequently, we showed the proposed method was efficiently able to normalize the channel variation based on the conventional CMS.

• Maxillofacial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.13-20
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• 2006

The articulation disorders associated with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) in cleft palate patients are interested to clinicians particularly. The purpose of this study was to investigate mainly the oropharyngeal air pressure and overall air flow in cleft palate patients. The pressure-measuring catheter was positioned at the midportion of the oropharyngeal cavity with a facial mask. Test words were composed of 9 meaningless polysyllabic words and 17 meaningful words. Aerophone II and Nasometer II were used to measure peak air pressure, mean air pressure, maximum flow rate, volume, phonatory flow rate, nasalance. The data shows that airflow of the cleft palate patient group were higher than those of the control group. Intraoral air pressure of the cleft palate patient group was lower than those of the control group. The first vowel formant and first Bandwidths of the cleft palate patient group were higher than those of the control group.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.18B no.6
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• pp.389-396
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• 2011

There is getting worse to various liver diseases due to change in eating habits, stress, alcohol etc in modern society. Therefore, we proposed methodology to diagnose early for liver disease to study the influence on voice in liver diseases. To this end, we carried out experiment to apply parameter of voice analysis to collect each voice inpatients and patients by treatment of liver diseases patients. Particularly, we carried out experiment to apply element value of pronunciation and the third formant frequency bandwidths about velar sounds associated liver in oriental medicine, then to produce objective index resonance cavity and influence vocalization in liver diseases. In addition, we carried out to study about design of system to monitoring a liver function in u-Health environment based on result by experiment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.25-44
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• 1997

When listening the various speech synthesis systems developed and being used in our country, we find that though the quality of these systems has improved, they lack naturalness. Moreover, since the voice color of these systems are limited to only one recorded speech DB, it is necessary to record another speech DB to create different voice colors. 'Voice Color' is an abstract concept that characterizes voice personality. So speech synthesis systems need a voice color control function to create various voices. The aim of this study is to examine several factors of voice color control rules for the text-to-speech system which makes natural and various voice types for the sounding of synthetic speech. In order to find such rules from natural speech, glottal source parameters and frequency characteristics of the vocal tract for several voice colors have been studied. In this paper voice colors were catalogued as: deep, sonorous, thick, soft, harsh, high tone, shrill, and weak. For the voice source model, the LF-model was used and for the frequency characteristics of vocal tract, the formant frequencies, bandwidths, and amplitudes were used. These acoustic parameters were tested through multiple regression analysis to achieve the general relation between these parameters and voice colors.