Acoustic similarities among voices. Part 2: Male speakers
Jody E. Kreiman, Patricia Keating, Neda Vesselinova · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
Little is known about how to characterize normal variability in voice quality within and across utterances from normal speakers. Our previous study of female voices suggested that only a few acoustic parameters consistently distinguish speakers, with most of the work being done by idiosyncratic subsets of parameters. The present study extends this research to samples of 50 men’s voices. The men read 5 sentences twice on 3 days—30 sentences per speaker. The VoiceSauce analysis program estimated means and standard deviations for many acoustic parameters (including F0, harmonic amplitude differences, harmonic-to-noise ratios, and formant frequencies) for the vowels and approximant consonants in each sentence. Multidimensional scaling and linear discriminant analysis were used to examine the acoustic characteristics of the overall voice space, and to measure how well each speaker’s set of 30 sentences could be acoustically distinguished from all other speakers’ sentences. Additional analyses of small subsets of voices compared the importance of global versus local details in discriminating voices acoustically. Results will be compared to those for female speakers, and implications for recognition by listening will be discussed. [Work supported by NSF and NIH.]