Voice quality variation with fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin.
Patricia Keating, Yen-Liang Shue · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
Previous research has shown that F0 is positively related to H1*-H2* across male speakers of English [Iseli et al. (2006)] and to H1-H2 (after inverse filtering) within individual male speakers of Dutch [Swerts and Veldhuis (2001)]. That is, males who have overall higher-pitched voices generally have overall higher values of H1*-H2* (cross-speaker relation), and as an individual male’s F0 goes up, H1-H2 generally also goes up (within-speaker relation). The present study investigates both of these relations, cross-speaker and within-speaker, for male and female speakers of English and Mandarin, and extends them to a large set of voice quality measures. The speech samples consist of repeated rising and falling tone sweeps, in which speakers began at a self-selected comfortable pitch, and then swept either up or down in pitch to their highest or lowest comfortable pitch. The beginnings of the sweeps are tested for cross-speaker relations, while the entire sweeps are tested for within-speaker relations. VOICESAUCE, a new program for voice analysis, is used to extract F0, energy, cepstral peak prominence, formants and bandwidths, and a variety of harmonic amplitude measures. Many measures are shown to be strongly related to F0. [Work supported by NSF.]