Muffled and Brisk Speech Evaluation with Criterion Based on Temporal Differentiation of Vocal Tract Area Function

This research deals with muffled speech as the evaluation target and introduces a criterion for evaluating the auditory impression in muffled speech. It focuses on the vocal tract area function (VTAF) to evaluate the auditory impression, and the criterion uses temporal differentiation of this function to track the temporal variation of the shape of the mouth. The experimental results indicate that the proposed criterion can be used to evaluate the auditory impression as well as the subjective impression. key words: speech analysis, vocal tract area function, auditory impression, speech evaluation

[1]  Hideki Kawahara,et al.  Tandem-STRAIGHT: A temporally stable power spectral representation for periodic signals and applications to interference-free spectrum, F0, and aperiodicity estimation , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[2]  Hideki Kawahara,et al.  High quality voice manipulation method based on the vocal tract area function obtained from sub-band LSP of straight spectrum , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[3]  Waveforms Hisashi Wakita.  Direct Estimation of the Vocal Tract Shape by Inverse Filtering of Acoustic Speech , 1973 .

[4]  Hideki Kawahara,et al.  Temporally variable multi-aspect auditory morphing enabling extrapolation without objective and perceptual breakdown , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[5]  Keiichi Tokuda,et al.  A Speech Parameter Generation Algorithm Considering Global Variance for HMM-Based Speech Synthesis , 2007, IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst..

[6]  E. Hoffman,et al.  Vocal tract area functions from magnetic resonance imaging. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  HIDEKI KAWAHARA,et al.  Technical foundations of TANDEM-STRAIGHT, a speech analysis, modification and synthesis framework , 2011 .

[8]  Herbert Gish,et al.  A parametric approach to vocal tract length normalization , 1996, 1996 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Conference Proceedings.