Speaker Specific Formant Dynamics of Vowels

Abstract

Automatic Speech and Speaker Recognition technology has growing demands in variety of voice operated devices. Although the input for all such systems is speech signal, the features useful for each application/task are different. Of the different speech sounds, vowel sounds spectrally well-defined and well represented by formants. Formants which represent resonances of vocal tract are the result of physiology of individual’s speech production mechanism as well as nature of speech (words) being spoken. In this way formants are features of speech as well as of speaker. In this paper significance of formants for speech and speaker recognition is explored through experimental analysis. Formant tracking and estimation is done using adaptive formant filter bank and single pole formant based filter. Twelve vowel sounds represented in ARPABET (Advanced Research Project Agency bet) form are used to estimate the first four formants. The analysis based on extracting and emphasizing speaker specific clues indicates that higher formants carry more speaker specific information than first (lower) formant.