Analysis and Synthesis of Speaker Age

Speaker age is an important speaker-specific quality, which was investigated in the two studies presented here. The first study automatically extracted 161 acoustic features from six words produced by 527 speakers, and used normalised mean values to compare the features. Segment duration and sound pressure level (SPL) range were identified as two important acoustic correlates of age. The second study developed a research tool for analysis of speaker age by data-driven formant synthesis and age-weigthed linear interpolation to simulate an age between the ages of any two of four female differently-aged reference speakers. Evaluation of the tool revealed that speaker age may in fact be simulated using formant synthesis. Both studies will be used in further attempts to model and simulate speaker age. (Less)

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