Acoustic correlates of breathiness: First harmonic amplitude, turbulence noise, and tracheal coupling
Dennis H. Klatt · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1987
A selected sample of reiterant speech has been collected from ten female speakers and six male controls in order to quantify acoustic correlates of perceived breathiness of the female voice, and to contrast these measures with comparable data from males. Two sentences with differing stress patterns were spoken by replacing each syllable by [hV] and by [ʔV], where V = [a,i,ae,o,rr]. Detailed analysis of the [a] data reveals (1) wide variation in the strength of the first harmonic (relative to first formant amplitude), with an average increase of about 6 dB for females relative to males; (2) a greater tendency for the third formant to be excited by noise rather than voicing harmonics in the female population; and (3) indications of tracheal poles and zeros in the spectra of vowels adjacent to voiceless consonants in utterances produced by both genders. These three measures of breathiness tend to be greatest in unstressed syllables and toward the end of an utterance. The acoustic data will be correlated with perceived breathiness of utterances from individual talkers in a preliminary attempt to determine which measure is perceptually most salient; future research using synthesis will systematically investigate perceptual salience. [Work supported, in part, by an NIH grant.]