The perceptual importance of selected voice quality parameters

Abstract

It is well known, that personal voice qualities differ in the speakers use of temporal structures, F0 contours, articulation precision, vocal effort and type of phonation. Whereas temporal structures and F0 contours can be measured directly in the acoustic signal and conclusions about articulation precision can be made from the formant structure, this paper focuses especially on the vocal effort and the type of phonation. These voice quality percepts are a combination of several acoustic voice quality parameters: the glottal pulse shape in the time domain or damping of the harmonics in the frequency domain, spectral distribution of turbulent signal components and voicing irregularities. In an investigation on emotionally loaded speech material it could be shown, that the named acoustic parameters are useful for differentiating between the emotions happiness, sadness, anger, fear and boredom. The perceptual importance of the above acoustic parameters is investigated in perception experiments with synthetic and resynthesized speech.