Formants and LPC Analysis of Kannada Vowel Speech Signals

Abstract

Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds and provides means to distinguish one sound from another in quality and quantity. A study of acoustic characteristics of Kannada begins with the phonemic analysis of the language. Phonetic analysis of Kannada vowels is presented in this paper. The analysis of speech signal based on formant space provides a method of assessing the influence of each formant on a phoneme across gender and different age groups. PRAAT software is used for the purpose of analysis of speech signals. In this work Kannada vowels speech signals were recorded from different age groups of both male and female. Formant frequencies of corresponding vowels were computed. The analysis is carried out separately for male and female speakers. The preliminary analysis of formants of vowels show significant variations across gender and age groups. In the similar way using the Linear Predictive coding (LPC) analysis is done to get in depth understanding of formants by considering different filter orders. Then order of the LPC filter is typically estimated by using information about the formants obtained using PRAAT tool.