Examining the voice bar
Sean A. Fulop, Sandra Ferrari Disner · Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2012
In a spectrogram of a human vowel sound, it is possible to observe the formant resonances which define the vowel auditorily. It is usually also possible to observe an emphasized frequency below F1, which has often been called the voice bar. Although recognition of the voice bar dates back to 19th century phonetics, it has never been the subject of a specific investigation. As a result, the nature and origin of the voice bar remain mysterious. Recent work on voice source synthesis [C. d'Alessandro et al., eNTERFACE 2005 Proc. pp. 52--61] has explained the appearance of an emphasized frequency in the neighborhood of 200 Hz--simply, it results from the frequency peak of the radiated source spectrum. Yet many speech scientists continue to ignore the voice bar, even to the point of denying its reality. Measurements of the voice bar in a number of different speakers and languages will be clearly shown in this paper, using reassigned spectrograms and linear prediction spectral estimates. The proper recognition of the voice bar can begin with this preliminary study, whose results largely corroborate the recently developed theory.