Within-speaker variability due to speaking manners

Some preliminary investigations of within-speaker variations due to voluntary and induced speaking manners have been performed. The ultimate aim of the investigations was to suggest methods to take care of within-speaker variations in automatic speaker verification. Special software was developed to systematically elicit different types of voluntary and involuntary speech variations that might realistically occur in every-day situations. A database containing speech from 50 Swedish male speakers was collected using this software. Acoustic analyses have been performed on and the results compared between voluntary and involuntary speech variations. The acoustic parameters that have been studied included segment durations, formant frequencies at vowel midpoints, fundamental frequency and overall amplitude and amplitude in frequency bands.