Significance of automatic detection of vowel regions for automatic shout detection in continuous speech

Automatic detection of shout prosody in continuous speech signal involves examining changes in its production characteristics. Our recent study of electroglottograph signals highlighted that significant changes occur in the glottal excitation source characteristics during production of shouted speech, especially in the vowel contexts. But the differences between normal and shouted speech, in the production features derived over utterances or word segments, may be masked sometimes by pauses or unvoiced regions related variations. Also, for such a real-time system, these vowel regions need to be found automatically. In this paper, changes in the shout production features are examined in the automatically detected vowel regions. Production of a vowel involves periodic impulse-like excitation and relatively high signal energy. Hence, the knowledge of epochs using zero-frequency filtering, and accurate vowel onset points can be used for detecting these regions. Changes in two excitation source features, the instantaneous fundamental frequency and strength of excitation, and in a vocal tract filter feature the dominant frequency, are examined for five steady vowel regions. Larger changes in these distinguishing features are observed in the automatically found vowel regions, than in word segments. This approach can help improving the systems for automatic detection of shout regions in continuous speech, and in paralinguistic applications that involve detection of prosody or emotions.