Perception of source spectral slope
Jody E. Kreiman, Bruce R. Gerratt · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2004
Researchers broadly agree that the spectral slope of the voice source is an important concomitant of voice quality, but it is unclear which specific aspects of spectral slope are perceptually important. To examine this issue, 50 voice samples were inverse filtered, and a large variety of measures of spectral slope were calculated for the resulting source pulses. Factor analysis was applied to determine which of these measures of slope are in fact independent. Synthetic copies of the voices were generated. Listeners used a method of adjustment task to manipulate these independent aspects of spectral slope in the synthesizer so that the synthetic copies matched the natural voice samples. Patterns of listener agreement and variability provide information about the perceptual relevance of different acoustic measures of source spectral slope. [Research supported by NIDCD.]