Automatic estimation of the second subglottal resonance from natural speech

Abstract

This paper deal s with the automatic estimation of the second subglottal resonance (Sg2) from natural speech spoken by adults, since our previous work focused only on estimating Sg2 from isolated diphthongs. A new database comprising speech and subglottal data of native American English (AE) speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers was used for the analysis. Data from 11 speakers (6 females and 5 males) were used to derive an empirical relation among the second and third formant frequencies (F2 and F3) and Sg2. Using the derived relation, Sg2 was automatically estimated from voiced sounds in English and Spanish sentences spoken by 20 different speakers (10 males and 10 females). On average, the error in estimating Sg2 was less than 100 Hz in at least 9 isolated AE vowels and less than 40 Hz in continuous speech consisting of English or Spanish sentences.