Estimated relative vocal tract lengths from vowel spectra based on fundamental frequency adaptive analyses and their relations to relevant physical data of speakers
Mayuko Kobayashi, Ryuichi Nisimura, Toshio Irino, Hideki Kawahara · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2013
A Japanese vowel database of males, females and children speakers (385 speakers in total) along with relevant physical data [Deguchi et al. (2011)] was analyzed using a set of F0 adaptive procedures, which were developed for a speech analysis, modification and synthesis framework TANDEM-STRAIGHT [Kawahara et al. (2008)] and its extensions. By restricting spectral region in estimating ratios for vocal tract length normalization (VTLN), cepstrally weighted distance measure yielded estimates with 2% standard error, by assuming relative vocal tract lengths estimated using regression analysis as the ground truth. A set of regression analyses of the estimated relative vocal tract lengths, average F0s, ages, gender, and physical data (speakers' height, weight) were conducted. The results suggest that the proposed analysis procedures applied to the Japanese five vowels may provide sufficient information for estimating speakers' physical data. Possible applications of the proposed estimation procedures will also be discussed.