A toolkit for voice inverse filtering and parametrisation

Voice inverse filtering is a process in which the effects of the vocal tract are cancelled from the speech signal to estimate the airflow through the glottis. Although inverse filtering has many applications in both research and clinical examination of voice production, few voice inverse filtering software packages exist. In the present paper, we propose a flexible software package, HUT Voice Source Analysis and Parametrisation Toolkit (Aparat) for use in the MATLAB environment. It implements glottal inverse filtering and several time-based parameters of the voice source in a graphical user interface. The software package is available under an open source licence at http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/software/aparat/.

[1]  Paavo Alku,et al.  Vocal loading of call centre personnel , 2003 .

[2]  P. Alku,et al.  Normalized amplitude quotient for parametrization of the glottal flow. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[3]  Paul H. Milenkovic,et al.  Glottal inverse filtering by joint estimation of an AR system with a linear input model , 1986, IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process..

[4]  Paavo Alku,et al.  Estimation of the Voice Source from Speech Pressure Signals: Evaluation of an Inverse Filtering Technique Using Physical Modelling of Voice Production , 2006, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica.

[5]  Paavo Alku,et al.  Objective quality measures for glottal inverse filtering of speech pressure signals , 2005, Proceedings. (ICASSP '05). IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2005..

[6]  R. Miller.  Nature of the Vocal Cord Wave , 1956 .

[7]  T. H. Curtis,et al.  Automatic Extraction of Glottal Pulses by Linear Estimation , 1974 .

[8]  Hideki Kawahara,et al.  YIN, a fundamental frequency estimator for speech and music. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  B. Hammarberg,et al.  Comparison between automatic and manual inverse filtering procedures for healthy female voices , 1999 .

[10]  G. Fant.  Acoustic theory of speech production : with calculations based on X-ray studies of Russian articulations , 1961 .

[11]  M. Rothenberg.  A new inverse-filtering technique for deriving the glottal air flow waveform during voicing. , 1970, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  Paavo Alku,et al.  Glottal wave analysis with Pitch Synchronous Iterative Adaptive Inverse Filtering , 1991, Speech Commun..

[13]  Johan Sundberg,et al.  Simultaneous analysis of vocal fold vibration and transglottal airflow: exploring a new experimental setup. , 2003, Journal of voice : official journal of the Voice Foundation.

[14]  Paavo Alku,et al.  Parameterisation Methods of the Glottal Flow Estimated by Inverse Filtering , 1985 .

[15]  Amro El-Jaroudi,et al.  Discrete all-pole modeling , 1991, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..