Using Zeros of the z-transform in the Analysis of Speech Signals
Paul Dalsgaard, Christian Fischer Pedersen, Ove Andersen, B. Yegnanarayana · VBN Forskningsportal (Aalborg Universitet) · 2008
The objective of this study is to analyze speech signals using the zeros of the z-transform of the signal. Trajectories of the zeros are used to study the characteristics of speech production. The trajectories are obtained by varying the parameters of the window function used on the signal segment. A skew Poisson function is defined with three parameters to control the window function. The proposed method does not assume any model for the analysis. Both synthetic and natural speech signals are analyzed. The goal of this study is to demonstrate, and eventually separate the information of the source part from the vocal tract system part of the speech production process from the signal. This may provide new and additional insights into the speech production process over and above the existing methods such as the spectral and group delay methods. The results from experiments with varying Poisson window parameters and speech signals are presented and discussed. Index Terms: Zeros of the z-transform, Skew Poisson window, Zero trajectories, speech analysis.