Discrimination of resonant frequencies of vowel like stimuli
Jean-Pierre Gagne, Patrick M. Zurek · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1981
The effects of source function, frequency, and bandwidth on the discriminability of resonant frequencies of synthetic one-formant stimuli were investigated. Two periodic signals approximating glottal waveforms (F0 = 100 Hz; F0 = 250 Hz) and broadband noise were used to excite a voltage-controlled filter whose transfer function resembled that of a formant. The periodic waveforms were generated with either no change in F0, or with a 50-Hz rise and fall in F0. Four resonant frequencies (fr = 300, 475, 650, 800 Hz) and four stimulus bandwidths (Q = 1.0, 2.8, 10.0, 36.0) were investigated. In general, the results show no systematic differences among the DL's obtained with periodic waveforms and the noise source. Also, as expected, the results show that the DL's increase as the fr increases and decreases with increasing Q. For the experimental conditions investigated, the results are well summarized by the following equation: Δfr = 0.079 fr/√Q.