On using voice source measures in automatic gender classification of children's speech

Acoustic characteristics of speech signals differ with gender due to physiological differences of the glottis and the vocal tract. Previous research [1] showed that adding the voice-source related measures H ∗ 1 − H ∗ 2 and H ∗ 1 − A ∗ improved gender classification accuracy compared to using only the fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies. H ∗ i refers to the i–th source spectral harmonic magnitude, and A ∗ refers to the magnitude of the source spectrum at the i–th formant. In this paper, three other voice source related measures: CPP, HNR and H ∗ 2 − H ∗ 4 are used in gender classification of children’s voices. CPP refers to the Cepstral Peak Prominence [2], HNR refers to the harmonic-to-noise ratio [3], and H ∗ 2 − H ∗ 4 refers to the difference between the 2nd and the 4th source spectral harmonic magnitudes. Results show that using these three features improves gender classification accuracy compared with [1]. Index Terms: gender classification, gender identification, voice source