Speaker Identification Using Vowels /i/ and /ɑ/ at Normal Pitch and High Pitch

Sreeparna Sarkar

doi:10.13189/lls.2016.040102

Abstract

In this paper, a speaker identification experiment is conducted where four male speakers are recorded in their normal pitch, uttering Cardinal Vowels 1 and 5, /i/ and /ɑ/ respectively. Out of these four speakers, one speaker is recorded in high pitch. The listeners are asked to identify the same speakers from lists of contrastive pairs of speakers in normal pitch in one set and normal and high pitch in another. This was done in order to study the effect of changing pitch on the listeners' ability to identify same speakers accurately. We also change the vowels in certain tests to examine whether the change in vowels affects the efficiency of speaker identification more or change in pitch. The results indicate that it is indeed more difficult to identify speakers when they change their voice from normal pitch to high pitch. Change in vowel also shows drop in correct answers, but not as much as change in pitch does.

Highlights

Since voice disguising is something that the forensic department deals with very often, phoneticians play a very important role in forensic investigations, for expert analysis and to act as witness to audio recordings of speech says French [1]
We are going to focus on speaker identification by using different pitch levels and examine how it affects their ability to identify speakers correctly
We can see from the graph above, the number of correct answers decreases towards the last few questions compared to the first ones

Summary

Introduction

Since voice disguising is something that the forensic department deals with very often, phoneticians play a very important role in forensic investigations, for expert analysis and to act as witness to audio recordings of speech says French [1]. The current paper focuses on pitch of voice, and tries to investigate the effects of varying pitch used for disguising voice. We are going to focus on speaker identification by using different pitch levels and examine how it affects their ability to identify speakers correctly. This study would indicate results which might tell us that it is more difficult to identify speakers when their voice is disguised from normal to high pitch and see if the effect is more on /i/ or on /ɑ/. 1. Keeping the pitch level constant, is it possible to correctly identify same voices when the vowels are same?

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Conclusion