Vocal Tract Size Research Articles

Klasifikasi Rentang Usia Dan Gender Dengan Deteksi Suara Menggunakan Metode Deep Learning Algoritma Cnn (Convolutional Neural Network)

The research discusses the identification of human voices based on gender by utilizing the differences in voice characteristics between males and females. In addition to differences in vocal tract size, factors such as length, thickness, and stiffness of the vocal cords also play a role in producing the differences in fundamental frequency between the two genders. Fundamental frequency serves as an indicator used in acoustic analysis to classify gender based on voice. In the automatic classification of voices, sound processing techniques and machine learning are key in system development. Gender recognition methods based on voice involve acoustic analysis using voice features such as fundamental frequency, formants, duration, intensity, and intonation patterns. Diverse voice datasets containing recordings of both male and female voices are used to train gender recognition models. From the results of research from modeling using CNN on audio to get 92% accuracy and for testing results it is good enough in classifying.
 Keywords – Deep Learning, Voice Recognition, Audio Classification, CNN, Gender

Comparing metrics for quantification of children’s tongue shape complexity using ultrasound imaging

ABSTRACT Speech sound disorders can pose a challenge to communication in children that may persist into adulthood. As some speech sounds are known to require differential control of anterior versus posterior regions of the tongue body, valid measurement of the degree of differentiation of a given tongue shape has the potential to shed light on development of motor skill in typical and disordered speakers. The current study sought to compare the success of multiple techniques in quantifying tongue shape complexity as an index of degree of lingual differentiation in child and adult speakers. Using a pre-existing data set of ultrasound images of tongue shapes from adult speakers producing a variety of phonemes, we compared the extent to which three metrics of tongue shape complexity differed across phonemes/phoneme classes that were expected to differ in articulatory complexity. We then repeated this process with ultrasound tongue shapes produced by a sample of young children. The results of these comparisons suggested that a modified curvature index and a metric representing the number of inflection points best reflected small changes in tongue shapes across individuals differing in vocal tract size. Ultimately, these metrics have the potential to reveal delays in motor skill in young children, which could inform assessment procedures and treatment decisions for children with speech delays and disorders.

Acoustic parameter changes after bariatric surgery

Objective To investigate the acoustic parameter changes after weight loss in bariatric surgery patients. Materials and methods This prospective, longitudinal study was conducted with 15 patients with planned bariatric surgery, who were evaluated pre-operatively and at 6 months post-operatively. Fundamental frequency (F0), Formant frequency (F1, F2, F3, and F4), Frequency perturbation (Jitter), Amplitude perturbation (Shimmer) and Noise-to-Harmonics Ratio (NHR) parameters were evaluated for /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ vowels. Changes in the acoustic analysis parameters for each vowel were compared. The study group was separated into two groups according to whether the Mallampati score had not changed (Group 1) or had decreased (Group 2) and changes in the formant frequencies were compared between these groups. Results A total of 15 patients with a median age of 40 ± 11 years completed the study. The median weight of the patients was 122 ± 14 kg pre-operatively and 80 ± 15 kg, post-operatively. BMI declined from 46 ± 4 to 31 ± 5 kg/m2. The Mallampati score decreased by one point in six patients and remained stable in nine. Of the acoustic voice analysis parameters of vowels, in general, fundamental frequency tended to decrease, and shimmer and jitter values tended to increase. Some of the formant frequencies were specifically affected by the weight loss and this showed statistical significance between Group 1 and Group 2. Conclusion The present study reveals that some specific voice characteristics might be affected by successful weight loss after bariatric surgery. Highlights Obesity reduces the size of the pharyngeal lumen at different levels. The supralaryngeal vocal tract size and configuration is a determinative factor in the features of the voice. Changes in the length and shape of the vocal tract, or height and position of the tongue can result in changes especially in formant frequencies in acoustic analysis.

Changes of Voice Production in Artificial Acoustic Environments

The physical production of speech level dynamic range is directly affected by the physiological features of the speaker such as vocal tract size and lung capacity; however, the regulation of these production systems is affected by the perception of the communication environment and auditory feedback. The current study examined the effects of room acoustics in an artificial setting on voice production in terms of sound pressure level and the relationship with the perceived vocal comfort and vocal control. Three independent room acoustic parameters were considered: gain (alteration of the sidetone or playback of one’s own voice), reverberation time, and background noise. An increase in the sidetone led to a decrease in vocal sound pressure levels, thus increasing vocal comfort and vocal control. This effect was consistent in the different reverberation times considered. Mid-range reverberation times (T30 ≈ 1.3 s) led to a decrease in vocal sound pressure level along with an increase in vocal comfort and vocal control, however, the effect of the reverberation time was smaller than the effect of the gain. The presence of noise amplified the aforementioned effects for the variables analyzed.

Formant Trajectory Patterns of American English /l/ Produced by Adults and Children.

Purpose Most acoustic and articulatory studies on /l/ have focused on either duration, formant frequencies, or tongue shape during the constriction interval. Only a limited set of data exists for the transition characteristics of /l/ to and from surrounding vowels. The aim of this study was to examine second formant (F2) transition characteristics of /l/ produced by young children and adults. This was to better understand articulatory behaviors in the production of /l/ and potential clinical applications of these data to typical and delayed /l/ development. Method Participants included 17 children with typically developing speech between the ages of 2 and 5 years, and 10 female adult speakers of Southern American English. Each subject produced single words containing pre- and postvocalic /l/ in two vowel contexts (/i, ɪ/ and /ɔ, ɑ/). F2 transitions, out of and into /l/ constriction intervals from the adjacent vowels, were analyzed for perceptually acceptable /l/ productions. The F2 transition extent, duration, and rate, as well as F2 loci data, were compared across age groups by vowel context for both pre- and postvocalic /l/. Results F2 transitions of adults' /l/ showed a great similarity across and within speakers. Those of young children showed greater variability, but became increasingly similar to those of adults with age. The F2 loci data seemed consistent with greater coarticulation among children than adults. This conclusion, however, must be regarded as preliminary due to the possible influence of different vocal tract size across ages and variability in the data. Conclusions The results suggest that adult patterns can serve as a reliable reference to which children's /l/ productions can be evaluated. The articulatory configurations associated with the /l/ constriction interval and the vocal tract movements into and out of that interval may provide insight into the underlying difficulties related to misarticulated /l/.

Variation of Formant Frequency with Nepalese Vowels

The regions of speech spectrum in which the frequency corresponds to relatively large amplitude are known as formants. For any vocalic sounds, number of formants may occur in the frequency range 0 to 4000 Hz. The formant frequencies of speech sounds are directly depending up on the shape and size of vocal tract. The aim of study was to study the variation of formant frequency with Nepalese vowels. Ten Nepalese vowels word in initial position /VC/ as spoken three times by 10 male and 10 female Nepali speakers were recorded in system in the free field of partially acoustically treated room. PRRAT software is used to digitize and analyze the data. Linear predictive coding (LPC) spectra were obtained for each of vowels and formant frequencies were measured. By plotting curve between formant frequencies and vowels, explain their variation.

Voks: Digital instruments for chironomic control of voice samples

This paper presents Voks, a new family of digital instruments that allow for real-time control and modification of pre-recorded voice signal samples. An instrument based on Voks is made of Voks itself, the synthesis software and a given set of chironomic (hand-driven) interfaces. Rhythm can be accurately controlled thanks to a new methodology, based on syllabic control points. Timing can also be controlled with other methods, including scrubbing and playback speed variation. Pitch, vocal effort, voice tension, apparent vocal tract size, voicing ratio, aperiodicity ratio of the voice samples can be modified thanks to a real-time high-quality vocoder. Different forms of chironomic control of the vocal parameters are proposed. Pitch is controlled by continuous hand motions using a stylus on a surface (C-Voks) or a theremin (T-Voks). Other interfaces can be used as well. Syllabic rhythm is controlled using a biphasic button. Scrubbing, playback speed and timbre related parameters can be controlled using the theremin, control surfaces or continuous controllers like faders. In addition to realistic imitation of speaking or singing voices, other playing modes yield new interesting sounds. Voks participated in comparative perceptual evaluation of singing synthesis systems. It has been demonstrated in a live musical settings, using different control interfaces. In addition to musical or poetic performances, applications of performative vocal synthesis to language learning and speech reeducation are foreseen.

The acoustic consequences for sibilants produced by glossectomies compared to healthy controls

Glossectomy surgery affects the ability to elevate the tongue tip (Grimm et al, JSLHR v.60, 3417–3425, 2017), which is known to affect production of /s/. Interestingly, /∫/ is less affected by glossectomy surgery. In this study, the acoustics of normal and aberrant /s/ and /∫/ were characterized using three parameters developed for normal adults and adolescents. Main spectral peak (FM) indicates place of constriction. Amplitude difference (AD) indicates degree of sibilance. LevelD indicates relative energy between high and mid-frequencies, reflecting source changes. Subjects were two patients and three healthy controls for whom acoustic, perceptual, and MRI data existed. The controls were matched by gender and vocal tract size to the patients. The corpus included three words and four VCV syllables where C was /s, ∫/. Results showed the male patient, whose /s/ tokens were perceived as /∫/, had low FM values for /s/. The female patient had more varied and less severe errors. She produced perceptually-distinct /s/ and /∫/ and showed normal means but larger variances for /s/ than /∫ʃ/ parameters. Overall, the acoustic parameters match both the perceptual and articulatory (MRI) results, and help to explain the detailed effects of glossectomy surgery on the post-surgery productions. [Work supported by NIH CA-133015.]

The Influence of Apparent Vocal-Tract Size, Contrast Type, and Implied Sources of Variation on the Perception of American English Voiceless Lingual Fricatives( Current Trends in Experimental OT and Laboratory Phonology)

The Influence of Apparent Vocal-Tract Size, Contrast Type, and Implied Sources of Variation on the Perception of American English Voiceless Lingual Fricatives( Current Trends in Experimental OT and Laboratory Phonology)

Variable production and indexical social meaning: On the potential physiological origin of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish

Abstract In several dialects of Spanish, men tend to exhibit more intervocalic /s/ voicing than women, e. g., oso ‘bear’ as [ozo], and this difference may have a physiological basis. File-Muriel et al. (2015, Disentangling the physiological from the socially-learned in gradient, sociophonetic processes: Evidence from s-realization in Barranquilla, Colombia. Unpublished manuscript) found that vocal tract size conditions /s/ aspiration in Barranquilla, and Nadeu and Hualde (2013, Reinterpretation of biomechanics as gender-conditioned variation in the origin of diachronic intervocalic voicing. Available at http://washo.uchicago.edu/pub/workshop/nadeu.pdf) contend that speakers with larger vocal tracts may have greater difficulty controlling vocal fold cessation. The present work serves as a continuation of these studies, utilizing 18 sociolinguistic interviews to determine (i) what factors are most predictive of intervocalic [z] in Costa Rica and (ii) whether physiology can potentially explain its origin. The results of a statistical analysis using 1,647 tokens of /s/ show that both gender and physiological factors significantly condition voicing (p < 0.001), with more voicing in men’s speech, as F2 decreases, and as f0 decreases. However, one would expect more gradient voicing in men’s speech if physiological factors caused the gender-based voicing difference, but women voice more gradiently while men produce higher rates of 0 % and 100 % voicing. We conclude that while physiological factors may have been its original source, non-physiological factors currently condition /s/-voicing in Costa Rica, with male speakers aiming for categorical targets for social motivations.

Acquisition of vowel articulation in childhood investigated by acoustic-to-articulatory inversion

While the acoustical features of speech sounds in children have been extensively studied, limited information is available as to their articulation during speech production. Instead of directly measuring articulatory movements, this study used an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion model with scalable vocal tract size to estimate developmental changes in articulatory state during vowel production. Using a pseudo-inverse Jacobian matrix of a model mapping seven articulatory parameters to acoustic ones, the formant frequencies of each vowel produced by three Japanese children over time at ages between 6 and 60 months were transformed into articulatory parameters. We conducted the discriminant analysis to reveal differences in articulatory states for production of each vowel. The analysis suggested that development of vowel production went through gradual functionalization of articulatory parameters. At 6–9 months, the coordination of position of tongue body and lip aperture forms three vowels: front, back, and central. At 10–17 months, recruitments of jaw and tongue apex enable differentiation of these three vowels into five. At 18 months and older, recruitment of tongue shape produces more distinct vowels specific to Japanese. These results suggest that the jaw and tongue apex contributed to speech production by young children regardless of kinds of vowel. Moreover, initial articulatory states for each vowel could be distinguished by the manner of coordination between lip and tongue, and these initial states are differentiated and refined into articulations adjusted to the native language over the course of development.

Cantor Digitalis: chironomic parametric synthesis of singing

Cantor Digitalis is a performative singing synthesizer that is composed of two main parts: a chironomic control interface and a parametric voice synthesizer. The control interface is based on a pen/touch graphic tablet equipped with a template representing vocalic and melodic spaces. Hand and pen positions, pen pressure, and a graphical user interface are assigned to specific vocal controls. This interface allows for real-time accurate control over high-level singing synthesis parameters. The sound generation system is based on a parametric synthesizer that features a spectral voice source model, a vocal tract model consisting of parallel filters for vocalic formants and cascaded with anti-resonance for the spectral effect of hypo-pharynx cavities, and rules for parameter settings and source/filter dependencies between fundamental frequency, vocal effort, and formants. Because Cantor Digitalis is a parametric system, every aspect of voice quality can be controlled (e.g., vocal tract size, aperiodicities in the voice source, vowels, and so forth). It offers several presets for different voice types. Cantor Digitalis has been played on stage in several public concerts, and it has also been proven to be useful as a tool for voice pedagogy. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive technical overview of Cantor Digitalis.

Speaker and Accent Variation Are Handled Differently: Evidence in Native and Non-Native Listeners.

Listeners are able to cope with between-speaker variability in speech that stems from anatomical sources (i.e. individual and sex differences in vocal tract size) and sociolinguistic sources (i.e. accents). We hypothesized that listeners adapt to these two types of variation differently because prior work indicates that adapting to speaker/sex variability may occur pre-lexically while adapting to accent variability may require learning from attention to explicit cues (i.e. feedback). In Experiment 1, we tested our hypothesis by training native Dutch listeners and Australian-English (AusE) listeners without any experience with Dutch or Flemish to discriminate between the Dutch vowels /I/ and /ε/ from a single speaker. We then tested their ability to classify /I/ and /ε/ vowels of a novel Dutch speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change only), or vowels of a novel Flemish speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change plus accent change). We found that both Dutch and AusE listeners could successfully categorize vowels if the change involved a speaker/sex change, but not if the change involved an accent change. When AusE listeners were given feedback on their categorization responses to the novel speaker in Experiment 2, they were able to successfully categorize vowels involving an accent change. These results suggest that adapting to accents may be a two-step process, whereby the first step involves adapting to speaker differences at a pre-lexical level, and the second step involves adapting to accent differences at a contextual level, where listeners have access to word meaning or are given feedback that allows them to appropriately adjust their perceptual category boundaries.

Acoustic properties of vowel production in prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants.

The present study examined the acoustic features of vowel production in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs). The subjects included 14 native Mandarin-speaking, prelingually deafened children with CIs (2.9-8.3 yr old) and 60 age-matched, normal-hearing (NH) children (3.1-9.0 years old). Each subject produced a list of monosyllables containing seven Mandarin vowels: [i, a, u, y, ɤ, ʅ, ɿ]. Midpoint F1 and F2 of each vowel token were extracted and normalized to eliminate the effects of different vocal tract sizes. Results showed that the CI children produced significantly longer vowels and less compact vowel categories than the NH children did. The CI children's acoustic vowel space was reduced due to a retracted production of the vowel [i]. The vowel space area showed a strong negative correlation with age at implantation (r = -0.80). The analysis of acoustic distance showed that the CI children produced corner vowels [a, u] similarly to the NH children, but other vowels (e.g., [ʅ, ɿ]) differently from the NH children, which suggests that CI children generally follow a similar developmental path of vowel acquisition as NH children. These findings highlight the importance of early implantation and have implications in clinical aural habilitation in young children with CIs.

Adults' perceptual voicing boundaries of 2-year-olds' citation form speech

One way that speakers distinguish between phonemic categories is through voicing, frequently measured using voice onset time (VOT). Much perceptual research on voicing identification and discrimination has used synthetic speech stimuli varying in VOT. Results from adult listeners typically show stable crossover regions in the 20–35 ms range. Subsequent work, however, reveals that listeners' VOT boundaries vary with speech rate; further, an extensive history of research into vowel perception indicates that listeners normalize across vocal tract sizes. These considerations lead to the possibility that adult voicing boundaries may differ between the speech of adults vs. children, since children have slower speech rates and smaller vocal tracts. The present study obtained adult discrimination data for natural productions of bilabial and alveolar cognate pairs produced by 2–3-year-old monolingual, English-speaking children. Randomized stimuli were presented twice to 20 listeners resulting in 4,000 rated stimuli per category. The findings show 50% crossover points for VOT values at 28 ms for bilabials and 32 ms for alveolar phonemes. Such outcomes are consistent with past work based on adult data and suggest that mature listeners do not use substantially different perceptual criteria for judging voicing in children’s speech. Declaration of Interest Statement The authors have no financial or nonfinancial disclosures to report.

The influence of gender identity on children's production of sibilant fricatives

Phonetic differences between men and women's speech are the consequence of sex-related variation in the anatomy of the speech-production system, as well as learned behaviors specific to particular languages and to specific social and cultural contexts. Children learn socially and culturally specific gendered phonetic variants concurrent with developmental changes in the vocal tract which give the child an increasing capacity to produce systematic phonetic variation. The research in this presentation is part of a larger project examining phonetic variation in 5–13 year old boys with gender dysphoria (GD). This presentation focuses on the acoustic characteristics of /s/, which was chosen because it is the locus of a great deal of gender-related phonetic variation that appears not to be the consequence of sex differences in vocal-tract size and shape. Preliminary analyses of a subset (n = 30) of talkers from a corpus of 5 to 13 year old children (n = 104, including boys with GD and boys and girls without GD), found that boys with GD produce more [θ]-like /s/ tokens than boys without GD in single words. This talk presents the results from the entire corpus, which allows for a more robust analysis of the influence of gender identity on children’s fricative production.

Gender and age differences in vowel-related formant patterns: What happens if men, women, and children produce vowels on different and on similar F0?

There is a broad consensus in the literature that vowel-specific formant patterns differ as a function of gender (men/women) or age (adults/children) due to different average vocal tract sizes. Although an additional influence of fundamental frequency F0 is discussed in corresponding normalization approaches, formant patterns relating to sounds of adults and children that exhibit the same F0, to sounds of adults with higher F0 than sounds of children, and to sounds of men with higher F0 than sounds of women are barely compared. Investigating vowels of men, women, and children producing sounds with varying F0, we observed (1) a possible decrease or even a disappearance of the expected speaker-group differences in the formant frequencies < 1.5 kHz if F0 of the utterances correspond for children, women, and men, and (2) a possible “inversion“ of the expected speaker-group differences < 1.5 kHz if F0 of the utterances of adults are higher than those of children, or F0 of men are higher than those of women. However, no corresponding relationship between F0 and the higher formants > 1.5 kHz was found. These observations call for a further examination of the role of F0 when interpreting speaker-group related differences in formant patterns.

A virtual environment for modeling the acquisition of vowel normalization

Vowel normalization is a computation that is meant to account for the differences in the absolute direct (physical or psychophysical) representations of qualitatively equivalent vowel productions that arise due to differences in speaker properties such as body size types, age, gender, and other socially interpreted categories that are based on natural variation in vocal tract size and shape. We present a virtual environment for vocal learning which provides the means to model the acquisition of vowel normalization, along with other aspects of vocal learning. The environment consists of models of caretaker agents representing five different language communities—American English, Cantonese, Greek, Japanese, and Korean—derived from vowel category perception experiments (Munson et al., 2010, Plummer et al., 2013) and models of infant agents (Plummer, 2012, 2013) that “vocally interact” with their caretakers. Moreover, we develop a model of caretaker social and vocal signaling in response to infant vowel productions, and of an infant's internalization of these signals and the internal computations over them. More broadly, we model the acquisition of vowel normalization within a developmental framework encompassing a suite of vocal learning phenomena, including language-specific caretaker vocal exchanges, perceptual warping, and multisensory matching and narrowing.

Graph alignment and cross-modal learning during early infancy

Results of decades of research on vowels support the conclusion that perception and production of language-specific vowel categories cannot be based on invariant targets that are represented directly in either the auditory domain or the articulatory (sensorimotor) domain. This raises a number of questions about how an infant can acquire the cognitive representations relevant for learning the vowels of the ambient language. Some models of the acquisition process assume a fixed auditory transform to normalize for talker vocal tract size (e.g., Callan et al., 2000), ignoring evidence that normalization must be culture-specific (e.g., Johnson, 2005). Others assume that learning can be based on statistical regularities solely within the auditory domain (e.g., Assmann and Nearey, 2008), ignoring evidence that articulatory experience also shapes vowel category learning (e.g., Kamen and Watson, 1991). This paper outlines an alternative approach that models cross-modal learning. The approach aligns graph structures, called “manifolds,” which organize sensory information in the auditory and in the articulatory domain. Graph alignment is guided by perceptual targets that are internalized in early infancy through social/vocal interaction with caregivers, so that vowel categories can be identified with the abstractions that mediate between the two domains in the alignment process.

Effects of fundamental frequencies and vocal-tract size in speech sound on scores of listening comprehension tests.

Effects of fundamental frequencies and vocal-tract size in speech sound on scores of listening comprehension tests.