Characteristics of phonation onset were investigated in a two-layer body-cover continuum model of the vocal folds as a function of the biomechanical and geometric properties of the vocal folds. The analysis showed that an increase in either the body or cover stiffness generally increased the phonation threshold pressure and phonation ...

Vocal tract gestures for adjacent phones overlap temporally, rendering the acoustic speech signal highly context dependent. For example, following a segment with an anterior place of articulation, a posterior segment's place of articulation is pulled frontward, and listeners' category boundaries shift appropriately. Some theories assume that listeners perceptually attune or ...

Larynx is responsible for the generation of voice and subsequently impacts on communication, social interaction, personality, and artistic expression. The vocal instrument is comprised of the vibratory body, the respiratory power source, and the oropharyngeal resonating chamber. The lungs are the power supply, the larynx is the vibratory source, and ...

Could neuroimaging evidence help us to assess the degree of a person's responsibility for a crime which we know that they committed? This essay defends an affirmative answer to this question. A range of standard objections to this high-tech approach to assessing people's responsibility is considered and then set aside, ...

This paper evaluates the capabilities of the Glottal to Noise Excitation Ratio for the screening of voice disorders. A lot of effort has been made using this parameter to evaluate voice quality, but there do not exist any studies that evaluate the discrimination capabilities of this acoustic parameter to classify ...

The use of hard-walled narrow tubes, often called resonance tubes, for the purpose of voice therapy and voice training has a historical precedent and some theoretical support, but the mechanism of any potential benefit from the application of this technique is not well understood. Fifteen vocally untrained male participants produced ...

Dehaene et al. (Reports, 30 May 2008, p. 1217) argued that native speakers of Mundurucu, a language without a linguistic numerical system, inherently represent numerical values as a logarithmically spaced spatial continuum. However, their data do not rule out the alternative conclusion that Mundurucu speakers encode numbers linearly with scalar ...

Impact stress (the impact force divided by the contact area of the vocal folds) has been suspected to be the main traumatizing mechanism in voice production, and the main cause of vocal fold nodules. However, there are also other factors, such as the repetitive acceleration and deceleration, which may traumatize ...

Talkers show sensitivity to a range of perturbations of auditory feedback (e.g., manipulation of vocal amplitude, fundamental frequency and formant frequency). Here, 50 subjects spoke a monosyllable ("head"), and the formants in their speech were shifted in real time using a custom signal processing system that provided feedback over headphones. ...

OBJECTIVES: Decreasing the closing speed of the vocal folds can reduce loudness and energy in the higher frequency harmonics, resulting in reduced voice quality. Our aim was to study the correlation between higher frequencies and the intraglottal vorticity (which contributes to rapid closing by producing transient negative intraglottal pressures). METHODS: ...

The voice source differs between modal and falsetto registers, but singers often try to reduce the associated timbral differences, some even doubting that there are any. A total of 54 vowel sounds sung in falsetto and modal register by 13 male more or less experienced choir singers were analyzed by ...

This study aimed to investigate the role of voice source and formant frequencies in the perception of emotional valence and psychophysiological activity level from short vowel samples (approximately 150 milliseconds). Nine professional actors (five males and four females) read a prose passage simulating joy, tenderness, sadness, anger, and a neutral ...

Vocal performance refers to the proficiency with which a bird sings songs that are challenging to produce, and can be measured in simple trilled songs by their deviation from an upper bound regression of frequency bandwidth on trill rate. Here, we show that male swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana) increase the ...

This paper explores the relationship between the acoustic duration of phonemic sequences and their frequencies of occurrence. The data were obtained from large (sub)corpora of spontaneous speech in Dutch, English, German, and Italian. Acoustic duration of an n-phone is shown to codetermine the n-phone's frequency of use, such that languages ...

Vibrations within the vocal tract during speech are transmitted through tissue to the skin surface and can be used to transmit speech. Achieving quality speech signals using skin vibration is desirable but problematic, primarily due to the several sound production locations along the vocal tract. The objective of this study ...

The vibrato is one of the embellishments most frequently used in the singing voice and it can be found in different singing styles, among those, lyric and Sertanejo (Brazilian country western-like singing style). Considering these two styles, the objective of the present study was to analyze the production of vibrato ...

Abstract Introduction: Vocal fold paralysis is one of the relatively prevailing damages causing voice disorder. There is little knowledge about how it impacts different features of people voice. Now it assumes that laboratory measurements may reveal the effects of this complication arising voice disorder.As, there are not authenticated acoustic measures ...

The present study investigated the immediate effects of eight altered auditory feedback (AAF) parameters on stuttering frequency during monologue speech production on two occasions. One of the modern commercially available portable anti-stuttering devices, "The Pocket Speech Lab" (Casa Futura Technologies) was used in the study to produce the auditory feedback ...

For connected speech, the time-varying vocal tract shape can be represented as a consonant superposition function that imposes constrictions and expansions on an underlying vowel substrate at specific points in space and time. The resulting flow of continuous speech sounds is a combination of characteristics of both the vowels and ...

Many studies from speech science have shown that the mel frequency scale more closely matches speech perception than the linear frequency scale. Automatic speech recognition engineers have empirically demonstrated that the use of the mel scale results in more accurate speech recognition than that obtainable with features computed with respect ...

This study investigated speaker discrimination in utterances varying in syllable length and speaker gender taken from the TIMIT corpus of American English. Twenty native English speakers presented one-, two-, and three-syllable utterances (within speaker gender) in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Perception results were analyzed in light of both source level ...

A distinctive contrast can be defined by a quantal relation between an articulatory parameter and an acoustic parameter. It is postulated that there are two sources of quantal relations. Aeromechanical interactions arise because the nature of the interaction of airflow with the compliant mechanical structures of the vocal tract can ...

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the neural processing of vowels whose perception depends on the continuity illusion. Participants heard sequences of two-formant vowels under a number of listening conditions. In the "vowel conditions," both formants were always present simultaneously and the stimuli were perceived as speech-like. Contrasted ...

As part of a larger study of acoustic characteristics of glides, patterns in the movements of the fundamental frequency of phonation (F0) were measured during utterances of the glide segments j and w. Two male and two female American English speakers produced intervocalic glides in six different vowel contexts and ...

Frequency-following responses (FFRs) were recorded to two naturally produced vowels (/a/ and /i/) in normal hearing subjects. A digitally implemented Fourier analyzer was used to measure response amplitude at the fundamental frequency and at 23 higher harmonics. Response components related to the stimulus envelope ("envelope FFR") were distinguished from components ...

An acoustic analysis of a German read-speech corpus showed that utterance-final /t/ aspirations differ systematically depending on the accompanying nuclear accent contour. Two contours were included: Terminal-falling early and late F0 peaks in terms of the Kiel Intonation Model. They correspond to H+L*L-% and L*+HL-% within the autosegmental metrical (AM) ...

Past research has established that listeners can accommodate a wide range of talkers in understanding language. How this adjustment operates, however, is a matter of debate. Here, listeners were exposed to spoken words from a speaker of an American English dialect in which the vowel /ae/ is raised before /g/, ...

Relatively few empirical data are available concerning the role of auditory experience in nonverbal human vocal behavior, such as laughter production. This study compared the acoustic properties of laughter in 19 congenitally, bilaterally, and profoundly deaf college students and in 23 normally hearing control participants. Analyses focused on degree of ...

The vocal folds of male Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni) are about 3 cm long. If fundamental frequency were to be predicted by a simple vibrating string formula, as is often done for the human larynx, such long vocal folds would bear enormous stress to produce the species-specific mating ...

Some features of emotional prosody in human speech may be traced back to affect cues in mammalian vocalizations. The present study addresses the question whether affect intensity, as expressed by the intensity of behavioral displays, is encoded in vocal cues, i.e., changes in the structure of associated calls, in bats, ...

Many social birds produce food-associated calls. In galliforms, these vocalizations are typically accompanied by a distinctive visual display, creating a multimodal signal known as tidbitting. This system is ideal for experimental analysis of the way in which signal components interact to determine overall efficacy. We used high-definition video playback to ...

The contribution of temporal fine structure (TFS) cues to consonant identification was assessed in normal-hearing listeners with two speech-processing schemes designed to remove temporal envelope (E) cues. Stimuli were processed vowel-consonant-vowel speech tokens. Derived from the analytic signal, carrier signals were extracted from the output of a bank of analysis ...

The goal of this study was to measure detection thresholds for 12 isolated American English vowels naturally spoken by three male and three female talkers for young normal-hearing listeners in the presence of a long-term speech-shaped (LTSS) noise, which was presented at 70 dB sound pressure level. The vowel duration ...

OBJECTIVE: To describe the timing of changes in fundamental frequency of the female voice following androgen therapy during female to male gender reassignment. METHODS: A 33-year-old female semi-professional singer undergoing gender reassignment and intramuscular androgen injections was examined at monthly intervals to monitor the impact of therapy on the voice. ...

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: A clear enunciation of consonants is crucial to text intelligibility, and consonants are identified by specific formant frequency patterns. The singer's formant, a spectral peak near 3,000 Hz, enhances the higher formants in male opera singers' voices. It is well known that the second and higher formants ...

The ability to develop articulate speech relies on capabilities that became available to our ancestors through changes in both peripheral mechanisms (vocal acoustics and anatomy) and neural mechanisms (vocal control and imitation). Few distantly related species (cetaceans, birds and pinnipeds) have shown the ability of vocal imitation, but of the ...

Speech recognition applications embedded on a PDA are already available on the market. The usual hardware for this kind of system is a single microphone mounted on the PDA, giving good results within quiet environments. Though, the recognition rate falls drastically as the signal to noise ratio decreases. Arrays of ...

As wheezes in abnormal breath sounds observed in patients with obstructive pulmonary diseases, the stridence in voice is manifested as excessively sharp, conspicuous, usually habitual hiss that is especially distinct with whispering. This paper reviews the articulator and acoustics features of stridence in unvoiced fricatives and affricates, and presents an ...

The effect of mid-frequency active sonar, has increasingly become an issue with navies worldwide. The U.S. navy ranges have been used to develop passive acoustic algorithms and tools to detect, classify, and localize marine mammal vocalizations which have been applied to an opportunistic passive acoustic study of Blainville's beaked whales. ...

Irregular phonation can serve as a cue to segmental contrasts and prosodic structure as well as to the affective state and identity of the speaker. Thus algorithms for transforming between voice qualities, such as regular and irregular phonation, may contribute to building more natural sounding, expressive and personalized speech synthesizers. ...

Most animals constantly adjust the spectrotemporal composition of their vocalizations depending on the information content intended to be conveyed by these signals. Whereas most studies focus on the sensory processing of spectrotemporal features of vocalizations in various vertebrates, it is still widely unknown how vocal motor structures in the brain ...

Previously, human perception of impulsive active-sonar echoes was investigated through paired-comparison ratings and multidimensional scaling (MDS). In the resulting MDS configuration, stimuli formed clusters representing aurally distinct categories. An interpretation is presented which suggests that dissimilarity judgments reflect separate processes for within- and between- category comparisons. The process of categorization ...

The aperiodic noise source in fricatives is characteristically amplitude modulated by voicing. Previous psychoacoustic studies have established that observed levels of AM in voiced fricatives are detectable, and its inclusion in synthesis has improved speech quality. Phonological voicing in fricatives can be cued by a number of factors: the voicing ...

French y (F2F3 close around 2000 Hz for males) does not have an equivalent phoneme in Japanese and English, whereas u (F1F2 close < 1000 Hz) has a phonemic counterpart (high back) in both Japanese and English, but its phonetic realization is different from French u, with a higher F2. ...

The actual shape of signal densities has become an important issue when studying speech perception within the framework of Signal Detection Theory (SDT). Using an SDT model that allowed unequal criterion variances, Lopez-Bascuas [Proc. Eurosp. 3, 2281-2283 (1995)] found that speech signals did not accommodate to the standard Gaussian assumption. ...

Speech acoustics and articulation are modified in speech produced in noisy environments. Is this simply a result of the increase in vocal intensity or may these modifications be some communicative strategies to increase audiovisual intelligibility? We recorded a first acoustic database with ten speakers and a second acoustic and articulatory ...

The auditory processing of consonants was investigated using an information-theoretic approach. Listeners identified eleven different Danish consonants spoken in a Consonant + Vowel + [l] environment. Each syllable was processed so that only a portion of the original audio spectrum was present. Three-quarter-octave bands of speech, with center frequencies of ...

Mandarin productions of English tense vs. lax vowels are difficult for English speakers to differentiate (Chen et al. 2006). In this study the production of American English [eI] and [epsilon] by Mandarin and American participants was investigated. The target vowels were embedded in monosyllabic and disyllabic words with a stop-V-voiceless ...

Tracheo-esophageal (TE) substitute speech is often used after total laryngectomy as it resembles normal speech more than other substitute speech methods. However, TE speech still shows restrictions and is perceived as hoarse, rough, with strain, and usually monotone, e.g., due to augmented irregularity of the voice signal. Commonly used diagnostic ...

Studying female response to variation in single acoustic components has provided important insights into how sexual selection operates on male acoustic signals. However, since vocal signals are typically composed of independent components, it is important to account for possible interactions between the studied parameter and other relevant acoustic features of ...