ANALYSIS OF SPEECH AT DIFFERENT SPEAKING RATES USING EXCITATION SOURCE INFORMATION

When humans modify speaking rate they do not perform a simple expansion or compression of the speech signal. In order to maintain the intelligi bility and naturalness of the speech, they modify some of the characteristics of the speec h production mechanism in a complex way. This causes the acoustic features extracted f rom the speech signal to change in a complex way. These changes a ffect the performance of speech systems like speech recognition, speaker recognition etc. Most of the st udies on the e ffect of speaking rate on acoustic features focus on features at segmental and suprasegmental level. The present work focuses on analysis of the e ffects of speaking rate on features at subsegmental level. Three features at subsegmental level, namely , instantaneous fundamental frequency, strength of excitation of epoch and perceived lo u ness are chosen, and their variation with speaking rate is studied. It was observed that instantaneous fundamental frequency i ncreases with increase in speaking rate, but when speaking rate is decreased the chang es in the instantaneous fundamental frequency is speaker-specific. Similar observati ons have been found in the case of strength of excitation at epoch. Strength of excitation d ecreases with increase in speaking rate, and the change in strength of excitation is speaker -sp cific when speaking rate is decreased. The e ff ct of speaking rate on the perception of loudness is also stu died using perceptual loudness studies. It was observed that fas t speech was perceived louder than normal speech for majority of speakers, whereas the di ff rence between perception of loudness of normal and slow speech is speaker-specific. It was also observed that speaking rate does not have significant a ffect on objective loudness measure. A modified measure of loudness in the case of speech at di fferent speaking rates is proposed, and its variations correlate with results from perceptual loudnes s t ts.

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