Whispered Speech Database: Design, Processing and Application

This paper presents creation of a whispered speech database Whi-Spe for Serbian language. The database has been collected in order to investigate how well the whisper is used by humans in intelligible verbal communication and how well whispered information can be used in human-computer communication. The database consists of 50 isolated words. They are generated by ten speakers (five male and five female). Each of them pronounced this vocabulary ten times in two modes: normal and whispered. So, the database contains 5.000 pairs of normal/whispered pronunciations. Database evaluation was performed by an analysis of specific manifestations in whispered articulation. Finally, the preliminary results in whispering recognition by using of HMM, ANN and DTW techniques are presented.

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