Inter- and intraspeaker variability in fundamental voice frequency.

A measure was obtained of the amounts of variability in fundamental voice frequency F0 in simple sentences produced by several adult male speakers. A comparison was made of intra‐ and interspeaker variability, and a detailed analysis was performed to determine the nature of this variability. Great variability was found between speakers, but more important was the finding that the intraspeaker variability was essentially as great as the interspeaker. This indicates that even for a single speaker’s utterances, considerable ’’noise’’ is present which can obscure the prosodic ’’signals.’’ The F0 variability involves seemingly random interleavings that affect the relative F0 values within an utterance, as well as, simple shifts in average F0 that affect the absolute F0 of the contour as a whole.Subject Classification: [43]70.40, [43]70.70.