High-Pitch Formant Estimation by Exploiting Temporal Change of Pitch
Name
Wang-2010-High-Pitch Formant E.pdf
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2.39 MB
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Author(s)
Wang, Tianyu Tom
Quatieri, Thomas F.
Date Issued
October 2009
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing,
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Citation
Wang, T.T., and T.F. Quatieri. “High-Pitch Formant Estimation by Exploiting Temporal Change of Pitch.” Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE Transactions on 18.1 (2010): 171-186. © 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This paper considers the problem of obtaining an accurate spectral representation of speech formant structure when the voicing source exhibits a high fundamental frequency. Our work is inspired by auditory perception and physiological studies implicating the use of pitch dynamics in speech by humans. We develop and assess signal processing schemes aimed at exploiting temporal change of pitch to address the high-pitch formant frequency estimation problem. Specifically, we propose a 2-D analysis framework using 2-D transformations of the time-frequency space. In one approach, we project changing spectral harmonics over time to a 1-D function of frequency. In a second approach, we draw upon previous work of Quatieri and Ezzat , , with similarities to the auditory modeling efforts of Chi , where localized 2-D Fourier transforms of the time-frequency space provide improved source-filter separation when pitch is changing. Our methods show quantitative improvements for synthesized vowels with stationary formant structure in comparison to traditional and homomorphic linear prediction. We also demonstrate the feasibility of applying our methods on stationary vowel regions of natural speech spoken by high-pitch females of the TIMIT corpus. Finally, we show improvements afforded by the proposed analysis framework in formant tracking on examples of stationary and time-varying formant structure.
Subjects
temporal change of pitch
spectrotemporal analysis
linear prediction
high-pitch effects
formant estimation
MIT Department
Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
Lincoln Laboratory
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tasl.2009.2024732
