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On the effect of changes in fundamental frequency and vocal effort in naive listener's speaker recognition
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Invariance and variability in articulation and acoustics of natural perturbed speech
Get PDFThe goal of this study was to evaluate invariance vs. variability in both articulation and acoustics of speech production units. To keep interaction of controlled variables manageable, only a very simple subrange of speech productions was studied. Three different vowel qualities and six different consonants were examined in a VCV sequence embedded in an utterance. Beside coarticulation vocal effort was a further factor of perturbation occuring in natural speech. The set of consonants comprised various modes of articulation (stop, fricative, nasal, lateral) all produced at virtually the same place of articulation, viz. (post-) alveolar. The range of vowel environments /i:/, /e:/, /a:/ was selected for differences in height, in order to vary coarticulatory effects between the segments. Utterances were produced at two different volume levels, viz. normal and loud speech. Experiments by others have demonstrated that higher speech volume is not simply realized as a raised sound pressure level or as raised intensity. For loud speech a number of different correlates were observed, as raised subglottal pressure (see Ladefoged/McKinney 1963), raised fundamental frequency, raised first formant, and change of segmental durations (e.g. Traunmüller/Eriksson 2000). Furthermore an effect on jaw height was observed in vowels, which is that in vowel production in loud speech the jaw has a lower position. In earlier studies results have been presented for either articulatory (Schulman 1989) or acoustic changes (Traunmüller/Eriksson 2000) associated with higher volume. The present study examines effects of higher volume level on vowels as well as on consonants, in the articulatory as well as the acoustic channel. Data from six German speakers (5 male, 1 female) were recorded and analyzed. In the 266 articulatory channel jaw and tongue-tip movements were analyzed, in the acoustic domain segmental characteristics as formants, duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. The main results can be described as follows: - Jaw height in vowels depends on vowel height, in the vowel production of loud speech the jaw is lowered significantly. - Jaw height in consonants depends on the type of consonant (very high for /s/, / /, /t/, fairly low for /n/, /l/). Speaking at higher volume level does not have a significant effect on jaw height during (post-) alveoloar consonant production, coarticulatory effect of vowel context is mainly found with /n/ and /l/. - In loud speech jaw gestures have higher amplitude. - Acoustic segmental duration is changed: Vowels are lengthened and consonants are shortened. - Fundamental frequency in vowel segments is raised significantly. - In all vowels the first formant is raised. - The second formant of the non-front vowel /a:/ is raised. This work has demonstrated that jaw articulation in a number of alveolar consonants is remarkably precise and that motor equivalence only plays a minor role. Moreover, it has been shown that in the face of the generally larger variability of acoustic and articulatory parameters, the results are best considered in terms of perceptual invariants. The findings also substantiate the complexity of articulatory and acoustic reorganisation in loud speech
Towards a new level of annotation detail of multilingual speech corpora
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to highlight the actual need for corpora that have been annotated based on acoustic information. The acoustic information should be coded in features or properties and is needed to inform further processing systems, i.e. to present a basis for a speech recognition system using linguistic information. Feature annotation of existing corpora in combination with segmental annotation can provide a powerful training material for speech recognition systems, but will as well challenge the further processing of features to segments and syllables. We present here the theoretical preliminaries for our multilingual feature extraction system, that we are currently working on
Formant Trajectory Dynamics in Swabian Diphthongs
Get PDFThe vowel quality in some diphthongs of Swabian (an upper german dialect) was determined by measurement of first and second formant values. A minimal contrast could be shown between two different diphthong qualities […], where for Standard German only one is assumed, viz. /ai/. The two diphthong qualities differ only slightly in onset and offset vowel quality, so a better understanding of their relationship was expected from an examination of their dynamic aspects. Our preliminary results suggest that there is indeed a difference in the temporal structure of the two diphthongs
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Vocal intensity: acoustic and articulatory correlates
Get PDFAnalyses of jaw movement(obtained by Electromagnetic Articulography) and acoustics show that loud speech is an intricate phenomenon. Besides involving higher intensity and subglottal pressure it affects jaw movements as well as fundamental frequency and especially first formants. It is argued that all these effects serve the purpose of enhancing perceptual salience
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