• Journal of Sasang Constitutional Medicine
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.61-73
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• 2004

This study was prepared to investigate the correlation between Sasang constitutional groups and voice characteristics using voice analysis system(in this study, CSL). I focused on the voice characteristics in terms of harmonics, Formant frequency and Formant Bandwidth. The subjects were 71 males. I classified them into three groups, that is Soeumin group, Soyangin group and Taeumin group. The classification method of Constitution used two ways, QSCCII(Questionnarie for the Sasang Constitution Classification II) and Interview with a specialist in Sasang Constitution. So 71 people were categorized into 31 Soeumin(people), 18 Soyangin(people) and 22 Taeumin(people). Pitch is approximately similar to the fundamental frequency(F0) in voices. Shimmer in dB gives an evaluation of the period-to-period variability of the peak-to-peak amplitude within the analyzed voice sample. FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) method in CSL can display sampled voices into harmonics. H1 is the first peak and h2 is the second peak in the harmonics. The amplitude difference of h1 and h2(h1-h2) can be explained as the speaker's phonation type, And Formant frequency and bandwidth can be explained as the speaker's vocal tract. So I checked the harmonics and Formant frequency and Bandwidth as the voice parameters. First I have captured /e/ voices from all subjects using microphone. And then I analyzed /e/ voices with CSL. Power Spectrum and Formant History is the menu in the CSL which can display harmonics and Formant frequency and bandwidth. The results about the correlation between Sasang Constitutional Groups and voice parameters are as follows; 1. There is no significant amplitude difference of harmonics(h1-h2) among three groups. 2. There is the significant difference between Soeumin Group and Soyangin Group in Formant Frequency 1 and Formant Bandwidth 1(p<0.05). Any other parameters have no significance. I assume that Soyangin Group has clearer and brighter voice than Soeumin Group according to the Formant Bandwidth difference. And I think its result has coincidence with the context of "Dongyi Suse Bowon" and "Sasangimhejinam".

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.112-121
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• 1997

In this paper, we study a model parameter compensation method for noise-robust speech recognition. We study model parameter compensation on a sentence by sentence and no other informations are used. Parallel model combination(PMC), well known as a model parameter compensation algorithm, is implemented and used for a reference of performance comparision. We also propose a modified PMC method which tunes model parameter with an association factor that controls average variability of gaussian mixtures and variability of single gaussian mixture per state for more robust modeling. We obtain a re-estimation solution of environmental variables based on the expectation-maximization(EM) algorithm in the cepstral domain. To evaluate the performance of the model compensation methods, we perform experiments on speaker-independent isolated word recognition. Noise sources used are white gaussian and driving car noise. To get corrupted speech we added noise to clean speech at various signal-to-noise ratio(SNR). We use noise mean and variance modeled by 3 frame noise data. Experimental result of the VTS approach is superior to other methods. The scheme of the zero order VTS approach is similar to the modified PMC method in adapting mean vector only. But, the recognition rate of the Zero order VTS approach is higher than PMC and modified PMC method based on log-normal approximation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.153-200
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• 1997

In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.